3 dead, dozens missing

Three people were killed and dozens were missing after a night-time landslide ravaged a small gold mining town in a mountainous area of the Philippines yesterday, authorities said.
The landslide hit at about 3am, ripping through shanty homes while miners and their families were sleeping and destroying poorly constructed tunnels where the unregistered workers extract gold using hand tools, they said.
Three bodies had been recovered by early yesterday afternoon while 10 people had been pulled from the debris alive, according to Susan Madrid, duty officer of the region's National Disaster Risk Reduction Management Council.
"But the number of dead will probably go up," she told AFP.
"There are 40 still missing and that is a conservative estimate. The one who gave the estimate was one of the survivors from the tunnels. They know each other there," Ligayo told AFP.
The landslide occurred in the isolated town of Kingking in a mountainous area of the resource-rich but poor and violence-plagued southern island of Mindanao.