Ten Punished for Disaster Rumors as Rescuers Comb the Steel Skeleton of Tibet's Buried Border Port

Five days after a glacier collapse on the Nepal side of the Himalaya buried China's Gyirong border crossing in mud, the disaster site has become the scene of two parallel campaigns. On the mudfield itself, rescue crews are picking apart the steel skeleton of the port's main building, brace by brace. On Chinese social media, police are fighting a different battle: on Monday, cyber-security police announced ten punished cases of disaster rumors, the clearest signal yet of how tightly the authorities are policing information around an event that has left hundreds missing.

The physical picture first. State broadcaster CCTV's footage from the site shows the port's main building reduced to a lattice of bare steel; the mud thrown against the hillsides around it stands roughly 60 meters deep, the height of a 20-story building, according to the rescue crews' own accounts. More than 60 searchers, who hiked over ten hours through collapsed terrain to reach the core zone, have combed a 40,000-square-meter area twice and are now digging deeper. Overnight rain has made the ground impossible for tents, so rescuers rest in the open, staying warm by staying awake.

Conditions have eased on one front: the Ministry of Emergency Management said Sunday that the third barrier lake formed by the debris — the third barrier lake — had drained naturally, removing the most immediate threat to crews downstream. Telecom operators have restored signal to the core zone, with an emergency base station now standing next to the border gate. Progress is fragile: when a night of heavy rain sent river levels surging during road-reopening work, two excavators parked on the bank were swept into the water. No one was hurt, but the loss underlined how narrow the margin remains.

Then came the information crackdown. In a "Clean Net 2026" campaign announcement, Tibet's cyber-police listed ten typical cases of fabricated disaster claims, most of them exaggerated death tolls. One man surnamed Qiu wrote that "the news says 1,400 are dead — there were actually 3,000 missing before that." A man surnamed Liu posted that "over 3,000 people have already died on the Chinese side." Another commenter, surnamed Zhang, insisted that officials were concealing the true scale, claiming "over a thousand people were swept away" while the government reported a far smaller figure. All were given administrative punishments, which in China can mean several days of detention. Officials argue that fabricated casualty figures mislead the public and torment families awaiting news; the ten-case announcement itself became one of the most-read disaster stories of the day.

What has moved readers most, though, is not the numbers but the objects. Videos from the site show rescuers carefully brushing mud from a police vest, a thermos flask, a woman's handbag — ordinary belongings of the people the slide swallowed. A Beijing Daily video of the finds, captioned with the observation that "everything in the mud was once part of someone's daily life," was reposted more than 2,000 times within hours. Another widely shared clip shows a young girl crying at the edge of the site, calling for her brother to be given back.

Officials have pinned the disaster on an ice-rock avalanche from a glacier on the Nepali side of the frontier, part of a chain of Himalayan flooding that has killed more than 750 people in Nepal and stirred warnings that the region's glaciers are becoming unstable. On the Chinese side, the last official count — 16 confirmed dead and 546 missing — has not been revised since Friday. The grid search inside the steel skeleton continues between rains, and it is that count, the one the punished posts distorted, that the searchers are still working to settle.