Local officials in northern China moved the bodies of miners killed in a flood last year and produced a fake accident report to downplay the scale of the disaster, an official report has concluded.
In 14 total bodies were discovered after the iron ore mine in Qianxi county in Hebei was flooded on September 2 and one other miner's body has never been found, a report by the Hebei provincial emergency management committee said.
But the report said local officials committed serious misreporting by issuing a report that only two people were missing - which meant the investigation could have been carried out at a local level.
The report said local officials, including the county's party secretary Cai Zongjian and mayor Shi Jingman spent several hours conferring after they learned of the accident before sending the false report to their superiors in Tangshan city, which is about 165km (102 miles) east of Beijing.
Seven days after the flood, the bodies of 12 workers were transferred to another location in secret.
According to China's regulations, mine accidents with less than three deaths are considered general accidents and are investigated at a county level. Between three and 10 deaths go to the city level, while accidents that lead to between 10 or 30 deaths are listed as major accidents that should be investigated by the provincial authorities.
The iron ore mine's surveillance equipment, records of workers entering and leaving the mine, and a roster of workers were all destroyed at the request of the party secretary and the mayor.
But their story began to unravel on September 10, when rescuers found the remains of a person who was not listed as one of the two missing miners.
This discovery led provincial authorities to start an investigation that uncovered the hidden bodies.
The accident report said the accident was the result of shoddy construction work and 20 people, including the head of the mine, the boss of the firm building the mine and local officials at various levels, have been taken into custody.
The de facto controller of the mine left for Hong Kong before the accident and is now wanted by mainland police.
The investigation report was published on April 28, but on Saturday it could not longer be found on the Hebei emergency management department's website.