KABUL, Dec. 30 (Xinhua) -- Three miners of a gold mine lost their lives due to a mudslide in northern Afghanistan's Badakhshan province on Monday, according to local media reports.
The victims were extracting gold in Kasham district on Monday afternoon when a hillside suddenly collapsed, burying and killing them instantly, the reports quoted Mawlawi Hayatullah Mohssan, the district governor, as saying.
In a similar incident earlier in October, two gold miners died when a tunnel collapsed in the province's Arghanch Khah district.
Locals attribute such frequent fatalities to inadequate safety measures, unskilled labor, the absence of essential machinery, and reliance on outdated traditional mining methods in the impoverished country. ■
