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BEIJING - The death toll rose to 31 on Sunday from a landslide in central China that buried a bus full of passengers and a team of construction workers, state media reported on Saturday.
Most of the bodies were found on a bus that was passing through mountainous Badong county, Hubei province, when the landslide occurred on Tuesday, Xinhua news agency reported, citing rescue workers.
Half a mountainside appeared to have collapsed onto the highway, photos of the scene suggest.
The weight of the landslide reduced the bus to a wreckage only 50 centimetres thick, and the bodies recovered from the interior were so badly crushed that they could be identified only by DNA, Xinhua added.
Earlier on Sunday the body of a 32-year-old man, one of a team of four construction workers working on the road when the accident happened, was pulled from under tonnes of mud and rock, bringing the number of dead to 31, the news agency said.
He was the second of four construction workers to be found dead. One was injured but survived while another is still missing.
The road connects the eastern city of Shanghai with Tibet. The bus was en route from Shanghai to Lichuan, a small city in Hubei province.
The area had seen days of heavy rain before the landslide.
Landslides are common in Badong county, through which the Yangtze river runs, Xinhua said in an earlier report.
Poor engineering is also known to play a role in many landslides in China, particularly when mountainsides are crudely blasted away so that roads and railways can be built. -- AFP
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