Since the beginning of 2026, at least four landslides are reported to have killed hundreds of people at the Rubaya mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a major global source of coltan. Coltan is widely used in smartphones, laptops and e-vehicles.

With the mines currently under the control of the Rwandan-backed group M23, and access restricted to journalists and many NGOs, the true number of casualties remains unclear. Frequent cellular network disruptions have also been reported across the region.

In the absence of reliable on-the-ground coverage, Bellingcat used open source methods to examine statements from the authorities and media reports. Bellingcat confirmed several incidents in which villages were engulfed in the landslide and residents living near the mine were among those killed.

Landslide No.1 – January 28

Reports of a deadly landslide killing more than 200 people began appearing in international media in late January and early February. 

Three days after the incident, the DRC government made a statement on Facebook outlining that at least 200 people had been killed. They said the landslide was “a consequence of the rampant and illegal mining by Rwanda and the M23/AFC”.

In response, the M23-appointed local governor, Lumumba Muyisa, told Reuters that at least 200 people had been killed, but attributed the landslide to heavy rains. 

Landslides are common in small-scale mines, especially during the rainy season, which in Rubaya spans from September to May and peaks between March and April. 

Bellingcat cross-checked local media reports against one of the few social media posts about the incident, geolocating the phone footage to a mining pit south-east of Rubaya. In the video, the narrator speaking in Kinyarwanda (the national language of Rwanda, also spoken in eastern DRC) pans from the top to the bottom of the slope. Filmed at a distance, no bodies are visible in the footage.

Satellite imagery captured before and after the first landslide shows how the mud advanced down the slope.

Landslide No.2 – March 3

Just over a month later, a second landslide was reported. On Facebook, the DR Congo Ministry of Mines released a statement including a provisional death toll of more than 200 people:

However, senior M23 official Fanny Kaj, speaking to AP, rejected the DRC government’s claims, stating: 

“I can confirm what people are publishing is not true. There was no landslide; there were bombings, and the death toll isn’t what people are saying. It’s simply about five people who died,” Kaj said. 

The same day the second landslide was reported, another M23 spokesperson, Lawrence Kanyuka, announced an attack involving “combat drones and heavy artillery”, at a location more than 250km from Rubaya.

Speaking to eyewitnesses at the mines, international media reported a landslide triggered by heavy rains, with no mention of bombings – only of workers buried under the earth. 

Bellingcat verified several social media videos of the second incident, in which dozens of people are seen digging for those buried under the mud. The clip below is an edited excerpt that excludes graphic images of bodies.

Edited video clip (left) geolocated to the camera icon (right). The white line (right) shows the camera’s movement as it pans across the slope. Source: Planet Labs PBC, March 26, 2026.

Later in the video, as the camera zooms in on several bodies, the narrator speaking in Kinyarwanda says: “Those you can see here have just been pulled out. These people are dead, but others are continuing to the search operations.” 

Due to the low quality of the footage, an accurate body count was not possible. 

Bellingcat geolocated footage of landslide No. 2 to the same location as landslide No. 1, shown in the satellite imagery below.

M23 did not respond to a request for comment on findings contradicting senior official Fanny Kaj’s claim that no landslide occurred on 3 March.

Landslide No.3 – March 7

Four days later, a third landslide was reported, with estimates of more than 300 people killed, according to civil society official Telesphore Nitendike. Speaking to EFE, Nitendike said the landslide had affected “more than 40 families” as houses were “swept away” by the mud.

Satellite imagery shows the landslide advancing from east to west as mud surged down the slope.

Before and after the third landslide on March, 3. Source: Planet Labs PBC.

Bellingcat verified more than a dozen social media videos from the third incident, the majority posted on X by local media accounts. Almost all contained highly distressing content, including the bodies of young children. In one video, the narrator walks through a crowd of more than a hundred people, then stops and pans across several bodies covered with blankets, saying: 

“These bodies were found here in Gatabi [name of village], inside houses. You can see how the houses were swallowed. The search for residents is still ongoing. It is truly a tragedy.”

As he continues filming, at least seven unclothed bodies, all young children, are seen being carried down the slope.

“You see, there, that’s another child’s body. These are children who were sleeping in their homes. Some were still in bed when they were swallowed by the landslide.”

Left: Video clip shows a body covered with a blanket on a stretcher. Right: Video clip shows the community-led rescue effort. The background satellite image shows geolocated pins marking the videos. Source: Planet Labs PBC, 16 February 2026.

Bellingcat geolocated 12 social media videos of the third landslide to a location southwest of Rubaya town.

Landslide No.4 – March 27

A fourth landslide was reported at the end of March by local outlets, describing the collapse of two mining shafts and the death of at least nine workers. 

Satellite analysis, combined with the geolocation of one social media video, indicates the fourth incident took place at the same location as landslides No.1 and No.2.

Before and after the fourth landslide on March 27. Yellow box highlights houses engulfed in the mud. Source: Planet Labs PBC.

Despite repeated attempts by Bellingcat to contact the DRC government and M23 for updated casualty figures across all four incidents, neither party responded. 

In February of this year, human rights group Global Witness called on companies and governments using or trading DRC’s coltan to ensure mine operators adhere to international human rights and environmental standards.

Bellingcat also contacted the DRC government spokesman and minister for communication and media, Patrick Muyaya, regarding a post he made on X that Bellingcat found to be promoting misinformation about the rate of expansion of the mines while under M23 control.

In the post, Muyaya urges followers to watch a video that presents itself as an open source report but includes satellite imagery falsely attributed to Bellingcat and “Planet Labs Inc.” We can confirm that this is not our work. The imagery also appears not to be from Planet Labs PBC, but from Google Earth Pro (illustrated below). 

The fabricated video was originally posted in 2025 by the Facebook account, Congo Kinshasa.

Contacted by Bellingcat, Congo Kinshasa confirmed that they were the creator of the video. Asked to explain why the satellite images were mislabeled and the analysis wrongly attributed to Bellingcat, they responded: “I don’t understand you. What exactly is your problem?”

Minister Patrick Muyaya did not respond to our request for comment on his post promoting false information.

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Claire Press contributed to this report.

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The post DRC’s Coltan Belt: Verifying Deadly Landslides At Mines Under M23 Control appeared first on bellingcat.

Ein Lastenrad von Peugeot, vermutlich aus dem Jahr 1914. So lange gibt es die Dinger schon. Damals natürlich ohne Motorunterstützung. Kosten dafür waren 435 alte Frances, was nach INSEE heute etwa 1650 Euro entsprechen dürfte. Gar nicht mal so billig.

Fiber-optic cable has become a staple of drone war. From Ukraine to the Sahel, combatants are fielding quadcopters piloted via kilometer-long lengths of cable that allows operators to control them across vast distances while insulating the drone from being knocked from the sky. This technique was once a cheap way for militaries to beat their opponents' electronic warfare, but demand for cable from data centers and war is raising the cost of every flight.

War is a cat and mouse game. One side deploys a devastating tactic and the other side figures out a way to defeat it. When small and cheap quadcopter drones began to dominate the skies, first by Islamic State and then in Russia’s war on Ukraine, fighters quickly learned it was easier to knock them out of the sky with electronic warfare than it was to shoot them down.

Then, in 2023, Russia began to deploy FPV drones controlled via lengths of fiber-optic cable. The cable sits spooled in a tube below the drone that unwinds as it flies. The fiber-optic cable provides a fast and clear connection between a drone and its operator and no signal is flying through the air which makes it immune to jamming.

Ukraine took heavy vehicle losses when Moscow began using fiber-optic drones but Kyiv quickly adopted the tactic and now wheat fields in the country are covered in discarded cable. Three years ago, this was a cheap and effective means of slipping past enemy defenses. In 2026 it’s not nearly as cost effective.

“Fiber-optics is still happening at the battlefield, although not as much as it used to be. It's extremely pricey now. We used to buy 50km spool for $300, now it's easily $2500. Just so you know,” Dimko Zhluktenko, a Ukrainian soldier, said in a post on X on May 10.

The price of fiber-optic cable has been steadily rising since about 2023 and has almost doubled in just the past few months. In January, Shanghai based fiber-optic company Sun Telecom declared there would be a “fiber famine” in 2026. Last year, a kilometer of its G.652D fiber cable cost $2.20. By December of 2025 the same length of cable cost $3. A month later, Sun Telecom had increased the price again to $4.1.

One of the big market shifts driving up the cost of fiber is an increased demand for data centers as companies rush to build out the compute infrastructure they believe they’ll need for AI. “Almost every phone call I get from my customers is trying to see, how do we get them more? I think next year the hyperscalers will be our biggest customers,” Wendell Weeks, the CEO of fiber-optic cable manufacturer Corning, told CNBC after his company signed a deal with Meta for $6 billion in cable.

In a January LinkedIn post, North Carolina telecom company Brightspeed warned of “fiber-supply shortages.” Two other American ISPs told trade publication Broadband Breakfast said they’d seen orders for fiber unexpectedly cancelled. “We have heard concerns in recent weeks of timeframes slipping, and concerns about the ability to obtain supplies at all, as circumstances change,” Mike Romano, the CEO of NTCA, a rural broadband tradegroup, told Broadband Breakfast.

Data center driven demand is only part of the story. Wars in Ukraine, Iran, and the Sahel region of Africa are hungry for fiber-optic cable and manufacturers can barely keep up. Combined, Russia and Ukraine consume 50-60 million kilometers of fiber-optic cable every year, according to Kyiv Post. Most of this comes from China because both countries lack the domestic manufacturing base to produce that much cable. The demand has caused the price of a kilometer of Chinese fiber-optic to go from $2.33 in 2025 to $5.83 in 2026.

The core component of fiber-optic cables is a long piece of flexible and manufactured glass or plastic called an optical fiber. The delicate strands are about the width of a human hair. Ukraine doesn’t manufacture optical fibers. Russia had one factory in the city of Saransk but Ukraine destroyed it with drones in the spring of 2025. Now both countries rely on China to keep drones in the air. Exports on fiber-optic cable to Russia spiked after Ukraine destroyed the factory, hitting a height of 717.5 million meters in November of 2025.

“Ukraine has recently expanded its use of Starlink communications for attack drones, which are impractical for Russia to jam. The cost of a Starlink antenna—which is expended in an attack—is now lower than the cost of the longest-range FPV fiber-optic spools,” Roy Gardiner, an OSINT analyst at Defense Tech for Ukraine told 404 Media. “The drive toward the development and deploying at least partial autonomous control for drones to defeat electronic warfare jamming will accelerate as fiber optic FPVs become less available.”

During war humans become great innovators. The game of cat and mouse continues and fighters are developing strategies to combat fiber-optic drones. In September of 2025, Russian and Ukrainian military bloggers began to report a new technique for countering the wire driven drones: a 150-meter-long fence made of spinning barbed wire. The theory is that the fiber-optic cable, dragged along the ground, will get caught in the fence and severed. 

Despite rising costs and the dangers posed by barbed wire, the drones keep flying. In March, Iran used fiber-optic controlled drones to strike American targets in the gulf, including the destruction of a Black Hawk helicopter parked in Iraq. The known fiber-optic FPV drones top out at about 50 kilometers of cable, a distance that will clear the Strait of Hormuz at its narrowest point.

Tech company executives are confident that AI will completely transform the economy and point to the changes they see in-house to prove that this change is coming fast. At Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others, leadership says that AI generates a growing share of the overall code, which makes it cheaper and faster to produce. The implication is that if this AI is good enough that tech companies are using it internally to improve efficiency and reduce headcount, it’s only a matter of time until every other industry is similarly transformed. 

Developers who are told to use AI whether they like it or not, however, tell a different story. On Reddit, Hacker News and other places where people in software development talk to each other, more and more people are becoming disillusioned with the promise of code generated by large language models. Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often a more time consuming, harder, and more frustrating experience because they have to go through the output and fix its mistakes. More concerning, developers who use AI at work report that they feel like they are de-skilling themselves and losing their ability to do their jobs as well as they used to. 

“We're being told to use [AI] agents for broad changes across our codebase. There's no way to evaluate whether that much code is well-written or secure—especially when hundreds of other programmers in the company are doing the same,” a UX designer at a midsized tech company told me. 404 Media granted all the developers we talked to for this story anonymity because they signed non-disclosure agreements or because they fear retribution from their employers. “We're building a rat's nest of tech debt that will be impossible to untangle when these models become prohibitively expensive (any minute now...).”

The actual quality of output doesn't matter as much as our willingness to participate.

Tech company executives love to brag about how much of the code at their company is AI-generated. In April, Google said that three quarters of new code at the company was generated by AI. Last year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said up to 30 percent of the company’s code was generated by AI. Microsoft’s CTO Kevin Scott said he expects 95 percent of all code at the company to be AI-generated by 2030. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg said last year he expects AI to write most of the code improving AI within 12-18 months. Anthropic says 90 percent of the code written by most if its team is AI generated. Tech companies have also been bragging about their “tokenmaxxing,” or how much money they’re spending on AI tools instead of human employees.

Predictably, the huge spike in productivity that these companies claim their own AI products have enabled hasn’t resulted in more or better products, shorter work weeks, or better consumer experiences. Mostly, AI implementation in tech companies has been used to justify multiple massive rounds of layoffs. To name just a few examples where tech companies said they reduced headcount because of AI use, more recently, Meta said it would cut 10 percent of its workforce (around 8,000 people), Microsoft said it would offer voluntary retirement to 7 percent of its American workforce (around 125,000 people). Snapchat said it would lay off 16 percent of its full-time staffers (about 1,000 people).