Three Feared Dead

Hopes Fade After German Mudslide Disaster

Two days after a mudslide pulled a house into a former open-cast mine converted into a lake in Germany, rescue officials are losing hope of finding three missing persons alive. Angry inhabitants are still being kept from their homes, and officials are trying to find out what caused the disaster.

German authorities using heat-detecting cameras have failed so far to locate three people missing since a massive mudslide early Saturday morning sucked a house into a former open-cast coal mine that had been turned into a lake in the eastern village of Nachterstedt.

Three people are missing from part of a house that a mudslide pulled down into a former-mine-turned-lake in central Germany.

"No one has been found alive in the water," Ursula Rothe, a county spokeswoman, told reporters Monday.

The destroyed building consisted of two attached houses, one of which disappeared within seconds when the landslide happened. The missing people, a 48-year-old woman and two men, aged 50 and 51, were probably asleep inside the building. A second woman, the wife of one of the missing men, was at work when the disaster happened. The inhabitants of the other side of the building were on vacation.

Frustrated rescue forces have still not been able to access the house to search through its remains. "It is too dangerous to search for the missing persons, as the hillside is still moving," local fire department spokesman Christoph Voigt told the Associated Press Sunday. Relief personnel have included police, fire, and military personnel as well as volunteers from the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief, a government-controlled disaster relief agency.

The mudslide caught inhabitants at around 5:30 on Saturday morning. It brought down a section of land 350 meters (1,150 foot) long and 120 meters (394 feet) deep that included the houses, streets and viewing platforms along the edge of the former mine to the water lying 100 meters (328 feet) below. The mine was in operation until 1990 and was filled with water to become a tourist attraction known as Lake Concordia in 1998.

Authorities have cordoned off the area and evacuated 44 inhabitants, who have only been allowed to visit their homes once to gather important belongings while escorted by rescue personnel. The town has been declared a disaster area.

"Everything is gone. We have absolutely nothing anymore -- no house, no cars, no documents, no photos," said Elke Schirrmeister, who has lived for 20 years in a house next to the destroyed building.

Officials have yet to determine the cause of the landslide. "We're going to need a lot of expert reports over the coming weeks and months," said Detlef Schubert, the economics minister of Saxony-Anhalt.

The prosecutor's office in the nearby city of Magdeburg has launched an investigation into possible negligent homicide and retained the services of mining experts, though it has not yet identified any suspects.

Some local residents don't believe that recent heavy rainfall is solely to blame for the accident, and they're speculating that parts of the mine running beneath inhabited areas had not been properly filled in before it was flooded.

The Lausitzer and Central-German Mining Administration Company (LMBV), which was in charge of the mine, has also said that the causes might be found elsewhere. On Sunday, company spokesman Uwe Steinhuber told the dpa German news agency: "Our predecessors carried out deep-mining operations here 150, 120 years ago. There could be old shafts that were not discovered or mapped out."

jtw -- with wire reports