Three women buried alive when an illegal mine caved in at Telmachho under Mahuda police station in Dhanbad district. The deceased were identified as Tilki Devi (30), Tupli Devi (28) and Seema Kumari (15), all were the resident Khairaghada Telmachho, police said. Police recovered the body and sent for postmortem.
According to the police dozens of women were mining ‘coal mixed soil’, suddenly it was caved in and three of them were trapped and buried alive. Notably, each and every day hundreds of the village women used to mine and collect the soil (coal mixed) to prepare ‘Gul’ which they used to sell in the market and to cook food in this coal belt region.
At the time of incident dozens of the women were there and waiting for their tenure for mining. According to the eyewitnesses soil was creeped following heavy rains during last night. Suddenly large portion of soil cave-in when women were engaged in mining, said an eyewitness. With the help of villagers the buried bodies were pulled out from debris, said S K Gurg BDO Bhagmara. later other administrative officials, mukhia and ward commissioner rushed on the spot and assured help to the victim’s families.