Many Killed as Gold Mine in South-East Asia Collapses

 

At least 90 people have died in a huge landslide in a remote jade mining area of northern Myanmar, officials said Sunday, as search teams continued to find bodies in one of the deadliest disasters to strike the country’s shadowy jade industry, AFP reports.

Those killed were thought to have been scavenging through a mountain of waste rubble dumped by mechanical diggers used by mining firms in the area to extract Myanmar’s most valuable precious stone.

The massive landslide crushed dozens of flimsy shanty huts clustered on the barren landscape, where an unknown number of itinerant workers had made their homes in the hope of finding riches on the side of the secretive multi-billion dollar jade industry in war-torn Kachin state.

Nilar Myint an official from the local administrative authorities in Hpakant, Northern Kachin, said: “We found 79 dead bodies on November 21 (and) 11 today so the total so far is 90.”

 

He also added that the rescue operation was ongoing. Acording to him: “We are seeing only dead bodies and no one knows how many people live there.” He said only one person had been pulled alive from the rubble, but had died soon after.

Myanmar is the source of virtually all of the world’s finest jadeite, an almost translucent green stone that is prized above almost all other materials in neighbouring China.

Landslides are a common hazard in the area as people living off the industry’s waste pick their way across perilous mounds under cover of darkness, driven by the hope that they might find a chunk of jade worth thousands of dollars.