Hope fades for 100 missing miners

Hopes faded yesterday that any of 100 people still missing would be found alive two days after a landslide near a jade mine in northern Myanmar smashed into a makeshift settlement, burying mine workers as they slept.

Rescue workers had recovered 104 bodies when the search was suspended on Sunday night, state newspaper the Global New Light of Myanmar reported yesterday.

It is unclear what caused a mountain of mining debris to give way early on Saturday in Hpakant, a mountainous area in northern Kachin State that produces some of the world's highest-quality jade.

The mines and soil dump sites are hazardous and deaths among workers picking through the slag piles for jade are common. An estimated 100 people are still missing, according to officials in the region, and the death toll was expected to rise as the search resumed yesterday, said Tin Swe Myint, head of the Hpakant Township Administration Department.

“We just don't know how many people exactly were buried since we don't have any data on people living there," he told Reuters by telephone on Sunday.

Workers, many of them migrants from elsewhere in Myanmar, toil long hours in dangerous conditions searching for the precious stones.