VisitCHN

BEIJING — Ten journalists and 48 officials have been charged with taking bribes to cover up a mining disaster last year, according to a report published on Monday in China Daily, an official English-language newspaper.

Mine bosses relocated bodies, destroyed evidence and paid the journalists the equivalent of $381,000 to cover up the explosion, in which 34 miners and a rescuer were killed, China Daily reported. Earlier reports by other news organizations indicated that the bosses also cremated miners’ bodies against the wishes of family members, paid grieving relatives to silence them and sealed the mine shaft with truckloads of dirt.

The disaster took place on July 14, 2008, almost a month before the Beijing Olympics, at the Lijiawa mine in Hebei Province, about 100 miles west of Beijing. The cover-up kept the disaster out of the public eye for 85 days.

In September 2008, someone reported the cover-up on an Internet chat site, and the ensuing clamor forced the central government in Beijing to step in, firing 25 local officials and putting 22 of them under criminal investigation. The charges reported by China Daily on Monday were the result of an investigation by the State Council, China’s cabinet.

The report said that 48 officials were being charged, including the mine owners, the county chief, work safety officials and police officers. The China Daily said none of the 10 journalists charged in the case had been identified.

Because of low salaries, journalists in China are often tempted to accept bribes, called hongbao, or red envelopes.

The China Daily said one of the journalists being charged is almost certainly Guan Jian, a reporter from Beijing working for a newspaper called China Internet Weekly. Mr. Guan was detained in Shanxi Province last December and charged in April with taking bribes from officials in Yuxian County, where the mine is located, in the aftermath of the disaster.

In that case, prosecutors accused Mr. Guan of receiving $36,600 from officials under the pretense of running two pages of advertising in his newspaper, and also receiving a so-called newspaper subscription fee of $4,400.

Last year in Shanxi Province, two journalists and 26 people posing as journalists were accused of taking money to cover up a coal mine accident in which a worker was killed.

Mine fatalities in China, even if underreported, annually rank among the highest in the world. On average, nine coal miners died each day in China last year — a rate 40 times that of the United States, according to statistics from the State Administration of Work Safety. Small mines, legal and illegal, accounted for three-fourths of the deaths but only a third of China’s production.

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