45 sentenced in China for garbage dump landslide

TIL Desk/World/Beijing/ Forty-five people, including several officials, were sentenced up to 20 years in jail for their alleged negligence and involvement in a landslide caused by huge waste dump in which 73 people were killed in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. Four persons had also gone missing in the landslide in December, 2015.

The suspects were tried in three courts from April 26 to 28 and the verdict was delivered yesterday. The suspects, mostly from Hong Ao landfill — the Yixianglong company which managed the dump site and local governments — were tried in the Intermediate People’s Court of Shenzhen, the People’s Court of Nanshan district and the People’s Court of Bao’an district.

Long Renfu, boss of Shenzhen Yixianglong, was sentenced to 20 years in prison and fined around USD 1.5 million for bribery and negligence which led to the accident. The dump site had a planned storage of four million cubic meters and a maximum stack height of 95 meters, but when the accident happened, its actual storage reached 5.83 million cubic meters and the waste heaps stood as high as 160 meters.