Rescue workers say at least 113 people have been killed in a landslide at a jade mining site in northern Myanmar.
The Associated Press
Emergency workers had to slog through heavy mud to retrieve bodies by wrapping them in the plastic sheets, which served as makeshift body bags that were then hung on crossed wooden poles shouldered by the recovery teams. Thursday's death toll surpasses that of a November 2015 accident that left 113 dead and was previously considered the country's worst. In that case, the victims died when a 60-meter -high mountain of earth and waste discarded by several mines tumbled in the middle of the night, enveloping more than 70 huts where miners slept.
Local activists have complained that the profitability of jade mining has led businesses and the government to neglect enforcing already very weak regulations in the industry. “Large companies, many of them owned by families of former generals, army companies, cronies and drug lords, are making tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year through their plunder of Hpakant,” Mike Davis of Global Witness said when the group released its report in 2015.
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