Landslide at Myanmar jade mine: 15 killed and 45 injured

At least 15 people in northern Myanmar were killed while 45 others were injured due to a landslide on Saturday 14 of July 2018 in the Hpakant jade mining region.

The miners were buried by muddy earth from a slope that collapsed according to Kyaw Swar Aung, the administrator of Hpakant, in the northern Kachin state. The search would continue the next day. "We stopped the search at 5:30pm and will continue tomorrow," he said, adding that authorities had appealed to people in the area to report anyone still missing. The affected miners were not working for a company. Informal jade scavengers, or hand-pickers, are frequently caught up in landslides in the poorly regulated mining area. Environmental advocacy group Global Witness put the value of jade production in Myanmar at around $31 billion in 2014. Experts say most of the stones are smuggled to China.

The event was not unprecedented. In May, at least 14 miners were killed in a similar collapse in the same area, and more than 100 people were killed in a landslide in Hpakant in 2015.