On 23 May, a gas explosion occurred at the Liushenyu coal mine in Qinyuan County, Shanxi Province, China. The accident killed 82 miners and injured a further 130, making it the worst accident of its kind in the country in the last 15 years. However, it has now been revealed that this accident exposed a high-level corruption scheme by the mining company Shanxi Tongzhou Coal Coking Group, whose executives have been arrested, according to reports from Reuters.
Apparently, the company maintained two separate sets of plans and monitoring systems. One set corresponded to actual operations, whilst the other was used to manage official inspections, and some mining areas fell outside regulatory control. It has also been shown that there were serious irregularities in the recruitment of staff for the mine, who, moreover, were not equipped with the appropriate detection or safety equipment for the task. Furthermore, there are hidden tunnels where ore was being extracted in a precarious and illegal manner.
This extra ore is not reflected in the company's extraction reports, as it deliberately installed false doors to conceal the illegal tunnels. When the explosion occurred last Friday, the official register indicated that only 124 workers were in the mine, but according to footage shown on Monday by the state broadcaster CCTV, there were a total of 247 workers at that time, suggesting that 123 had not been registered and were working in tunnels outside the official scope. The lack of accurate maps and information on the miners' location has severely hampered rescue operations, and the search for the missing continues.