A number of buildings were fully or partially collapsed in Shenzhen
A local official in
the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen has apparently killed himself,
days after a landslide there buried dozens of people.
Police said
the man who fell off an apartment block on Sunday night was the former
head of the local Urban Administrative Bureau.He is thought to have authorised the landfill site that collapsed.
It is the third recent case in China where officials appear to have killed themselves after industrial disasters.
The 20 December landslide engulfed 22 buildings at an industrial park in the city, one of China's biggest and a major industrial centre.
More than 70 people were buried and are still unaccounted for. An official investigation is under way.
Over the weekend, the owner of a mine where miners were trapped by a rockfall jumped down a shaft, killing himself, in an apparent suicide.
Earlier in the year, an official in Tianjin fell to his death from a high building after the massive chemical explosion which killed 173 people.
The BBC's Stephen Evans, in Beijing, says the reason for the deaths is not clear - but one possibility is that a crackdown on people responsible for accidents is pushing them to take their own lives rather than face long imprisonment and the confiscation of wealth.
