Soldiers, police and volunteers pulled body after body from the rubble on Monday, as the death toll from a landslide near several jade mines in northern Myanmar reached 113, a local official said. More than 100 others were missing.
The collapse early on Saturday in Kachin state’s mining community of Hpakant was the worst such disaster in recent memory.
The corpses were taken to a morgue, where friends and relatives broke down as they identified the victims. Some were buried at a cemetery and others were cremated, but there were stacks of unidentified bodies wrapped in blue plastic tarpaulin.
Kachin is home to some of the world’s highest-quality jade, and the industry generated an estimated $31bn (£20.4bn) last year, with most of the wealth going to individuals and companies tied to Myanmar’s former military rulers, according to Global Witness, a group that investigates misuse of resource revenues.
Myanmar's military elite and drug lords run £20bn jade trade, report says
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Hpakant, 600 miles (950km) north-east of Myanmar’s biggest city, Yangon, is the industry’s heartland. But it remains desperately poor, with bumpy dirt roads, constant electricity blackouts and sky-high heroin addiction rates.