YANGON: A landslide in northern Myanmar’s jade mining region has killed 9 people, a local official said Saturday, the latest fatal incident to strike the shadowy billion-dollar industry.
The men were believed to be searching for jade in Kachin state when a wall of unstable earth collapsed late Thursday night.
Five bodies were found buried beneath the rubble on Thursday and three more were found on Friday, said Kyaw Swar Aung, the administrator of Hpakant — the heart of Myanmar’s jade-producing region.
Rescuers also found two injured men, but one was pronounced dead at the hospital, he added.
“The total number of dead bodies found was nine. Their funerals are today,” he told AFP.
Myanmar is the chief source of the world’s finest jadeite, a near-translucent green stone that is highly prized in China.
But the secretive trade is poorly regulated and enormously dangerous.
The area around Hpakant has suffered a string of deadly landslides in recent years, with a major incident in November 2015 leaving more than 100 dead.
Numerous other smaller accidents have left scores more dead or injured.
The victims are usually impoverished locals or itinerant workers scouring the area for pieces of of jade left behind by the industrial diggers that have turned the region into a moonscape of environmental destruction.
While the mining firms — many linked to the junta-era military elite — are thought to be raking in huge sums, local people say they are shut off from the bounty.
Myanmar jade mine landslide kills 9: Official
Myanmar jade mine landslide kills 9: Official
French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading
- Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years
PARIS, France: A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 terrorist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.
His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.
Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.
Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologized to the teacher’s family.
The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.
The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.
