Rescuers who intervened after a landslide occurred in an illegal jade mine in northern Burma stopped their search on Friday and reported six dead and dozens of missing, presumably also deceased.
Immediately after the catastrophe occurred, near Hpakant on Wednesday, the authorities indicated that at least 70 people were swept away by the torrent of mud and stones, to later clarify that this figure has yet to be confirmed.
“We stopped our search at 4.30 pm local time and, with the two today, a total of six bodies were found,” Ko Jack, of the Burmese relief organization, told AFP.
He specified that his teams would put an end to their diving operations and that the missing will most likely be buried. The side of a hill, where the mine was, was washed into a lake by tons of earth and rocks.
Dozens of people die every year working in the lucrative and poorly regulated jade trade, poorly paid workers from other regions of Burma who extract these highly coveted stones, especially in China.
In 2020, heavy monsoon rains caused the worst drama of its kind, with 300 miners buried after a landslide, also in the Hpakant massif.
Miners come here from all over Burma to earn a living digging open sites abandoned by mining companies, hoping to find blocks of jade that were not mined.
Determining how many people worked before this new disaster is difficult, according to first responders, since families are reluctant to report whether their loved ones were there and survivors to identify themselves.
Jade and other very abundant natural resources in northern Burma, including wood, gold and amber, have financed both sides of a decades-long civil war between Kachin rebels and the military. .
The coup d’état perpetrated last February eliminated any possibility of reforming this sector, which the government of Aung San Suu Kyi had begun to do, according to the human rights NGO Global Witness in a report published this year. .
