CHINA: Chinese Sentence Communist Official

05/06/02

A Communist Party official in China has been sentenced to death for trying to cover up a tin mine accident last year that killed 81 people, a court official said Wednesday.

 3 other officials were sentenced to prison terms of 10 to 20 years by the Nanning Intermediate People's Court in the southern region of Guangxi, said the official, who gave only his family name, He.

 Wan Ruizhong, party secretary of Nandan county, was convicted of taking bribes from mine officials in exchange for not reporting the July 17, 2001 accident, He said.

 The court ruled that Wan delayed organizing a rescue and hindered an investigation into the mine accident, He said.

 The accident revealed Beijing's vulnerability to deception by lower-level officials far from the capital. China's Cabinet took the unusual step of sending its own investigators for a probe after Chinese journalists exposed the accident.

 Media reports said mine officials hired armed thugs and tried to pay off victims' families to hide the accident.

 Police discovered Wan had about $400,000 in cash and valuables that he could not account for, the court official said. The amount is dozens of times the annual salary of officials in similar positions.

 Investigators concluded that the miners were blasting underground when they ripped a hole in a wall separating them from an unused shaft filled with water. The miners died in the flood.

 The accident was one of the worst in a disastrous year for China's mining industry, when accidents killed more than 5,000 miners.