GOMA, Congo (AP) — After a landslide last week killed at least 200 people in eastern Congo at a rebel-controlled coltan mine, families of the deceased and survivors are mourning their lost loved ones, and some survivors prepared to head back to the reopened mines.
On Wednesday, following heavy rains in eastern Congo, a network of hand-dug tunnels at the Rubaya mining complex collapsed, killing at least 200 artisanal miners and trapping an unknown number who remain missing. The mine, located around 25 miles (40 kilometers) to the west of the regional capital of Goma, has been under the control of Rwandan-backed M23 rebels since early 2024 and employs thousands of miners who work largely by hand.
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People look at pictures of Nguvumali Kalabosh Bosco, who died when tunnels collapsed at a major coltan mining site due to landslides, in Goma, eastern Congo, Monday, Feb. 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Moses Sawasawa)
People mourn Nguvumali Kalabosh Bosco, who died when tunnels collapsed at a major coltan mining site due to landslides, in Goma, eastern Congo, Monday, Feb. 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Moses Sawasawa)
FILE - Miners work at the D4 Gakombe coltan mining quarry in Rubaya, Congo, May 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Moses Sawasawa, File)
People attend a memorial Nguvumali Kalabosh Bosco, who died when tunnels collapsed at a major coltan mining site due to landslides, in Goma, eastern Congo, Monday, Feb. 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Moses Sawasawa)
People attend a memorial for Nguvumali Kalabosh Bosco, who died when tunnels collapsed at a major coltan mining site due to landslides, in Goma, eastern Congo, Monday, Feb. 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Moses Sawasawa)
In the Mugunga neighborhood in Goma, the family of Bosco Nguvumali Kalabosh, 39, mourned his death Monday.
Since last Thursday, relatives, neighbors and loved ones have been gathering at the family home, sitting around a photograph of him placed up against a wall.
“He was supposed to return to Goma on Thursday,” said his older brother, Thimothée Kalabosh Nzanga.
Kalabosh had been a miner for more than 10 years. He owned his own mines on the site and came from a family where artisanal mining — mining for minerals using basic hand tools — had been passed down from generation to generation. He leaves behind a widow and four children, the eldest of whom is 5 years old.
For survivors trickling back into town, the pressure to return to the mines is clear — despite the constant danger.
Tumaini Munguiko, a survivor of the collapse, came to offer his condolences to Kalabosh’s family. “Seeing our peers die is very painful. But despite the pain, we are forced to return to the mines to survive,” he said.
Munguiko calmly explained that he had already experienced several similar disasters. “It has almost become normal. We accept it because it is our means of survival. I was saved this time, but I lost five friends and my older brother.”
According to him, landslides are common in Rubaya, especially during the rainy season. “When it rains, the clay soils become unstable. Some take shelter, others perish, others survive, and others watch from afar,” he said.
Miners dig long tunnels, often parallel to one another, with limited support and no safe evacuation route in case of a collapse.
A former miner at the site told The Associated Press that there have been repeated landslides because the tunnels are dug by hand, poorly constructed and not maintained.
“People dig everywhere, without control or safety measures. In a single pit, there can be as many as 500 miners, and because the tunnels run parallel, one collapse can affect many pits at once,” former miner Clovis Mafare said.
“The diggers don’t have insurance,” said Mafare. Of potential compensation for families, he said: “It’s a whole legal process, and it’s very long. They might receive some money for the funerals, but that small amount isn’t compensation.”
Kalabosh's family has not received compensation for their loss.
However, both Munguiko and Nzanga say they will return to the mines soon despite the risks.
“I have no choice. Our whole life is there,” said Munguiko.
The Rubaya mines have been at the center of the recent fighting in eastern Congo, changing hands between the Congolese government and rebel groups. For over a year now, the site has been controlled by the M23 rebels.
The mines produce coltan — short for columbite-tantalite — an ore from which the metals tantalum and niobium are extracted. Both are considered critical raw materials by the United States, the European Union, China and Japan. Tantalum is used in mobile phones, computers and automotive electronics, as well as in aircraft engines, missile components and GPS systems. Niobium is used in pipelines, rockets and jet engines.
The mines at Rubaya are massive and attract people from across the region. Artisanal miners and workers have been flocking there for years, drawn to the site to earn a steady income in a region plagued by poverty and chronic insecurity. A disaster like this affects people across eastern Congo and the grief has spread to regional hubs like Goma.
For the last two weeks, Rubaya has been virtually cut off from the world. The mining town has no mobile network or internet connection. Poor infrastructure, coupled with persistent conflict, means cellular service and electricity are unreliable. To communicate with the outside world, residents must pay around 5,000 Congolese francs — just over $2 — for 30 minutes of connection via a private Starlink system.
Congo’s government, in a statement on X, expressed solidarity with the victims’ families and accused the rebels of illegally and unsafely exploiting the region’s natural resources while blaming Rwanda. An M23 spokesperson accused the government of politicizing the tragedy and listed other collapses at government-controlled mines.
People look at pictures of Nguvumali Kalabosh Bosco, who died when tunnels collapsed at a major coltan mining site due to landslides, in Goma, eastern Congo, Monday, Feb. 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Moses Sawasawa)
People mourn Nguvumali Kalabosh Bosco, who died when tunnels collapsed at a major coltan mining site due to landslides, in Goma, eastern Congo, Monday, Feb. 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Moses Sawasawa)
FILE - Miners work at the D4 Gakombe coltan mining quarry in Rubaya, Congo, May 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Moses Sawasawa, File)
People attend a memorial Nguvumali Kalabosh Bosco, who died when tunnels collapsed at a major coltan mining site due to landslides, in Goma, eastern Congo, Monday, Feb. 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Moses Sawasawa)
People attend a memorial for Nguvumali Kalabosh Bosco, who died when tunnels collapsed at a major coltan mining site due to landslides, in Goma, eastern Congo, Monday, Feb. 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Moses Sawasawa)
NEW YORK (AP) — On a recent weeknight, three tenants of an aging Bronx building were trading apartment horror stories inside a packed ballroom lined with city bureaucrats.
The occasion was the third in a series of “rental rip-off hearings,” a new forum launched by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani for disgruntled renters to air their complaints directly to housing officials — and in some cases, the mayor himself.
As she waited in line, Gulhayo Yuldosheva said she worried that noxious mold in her apartment had worsened her child’s asthma. Nearby, her downstairs neighbor, Marina Quiroz, was showing a video of rats scurrying through her kitchen to a representative of the city’s tenant protection office.
Ann Maitin, a longtime resident of the same building, had just met with the mayor.
“He let me go over my three minutes,” she said, holding up a spiral notebook’s worth of grievances.
Mamdani, a democratic socialist swept into office on a promise of zealous tenant advocacy, framed the event as a struggle session for renters, assuring the standing room only crowd that their stories would guide the city's efforts “to actually hold landlords accountable when they don’t follow the law."
To the residents of 705 Gerard Avenue, this raised a practical problem: No one seemed to know who actually owned their building.
“It feels like such a basic question,” said Maitin, a retired Verizon technician who recently organized the building’s tenant association. “You’d think we’d have the right to that information.”
Their situation is hardly unique. As corporate owners and investor groups have grown their share of the rental market in New York City, they are increasingly shielding their identities behind limited liability companies, or LLCs.
The practice, which has also been spreading nationally, is legal. But experts warn it could complicate Mamdani’s promised crackdown, making it harder for the city and tenants to track the chronically negligent owners whose buildings the mayor has vowed to target and even seize.
“There are these big slumlords that everyone knows are doing predatory investment, but pinning them down is going to be difficult, for the LLC reason,” said Oksana Mironova, a housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society. “That’s a problem for the administration, and it’s even worse for tenants.”
For Yuldosheva and her neighbors, finding their landlord is one of many problems afflicting their six-story building near Yankee Stadium.
Heat and hot water outages are regular enough that some tenants keep a thermometer on their fridge and the city’s complaint hotline on speed dial. Common areas are often filthy, and increasingly populated by drug users. Getting help with an urgent maintenance issue “feels like waiting for Christmas in July,” said Maitin.
During a monthslong elevator outage, a tenant who uses a wheelchair, Tommy Rodriguez, said he was forced to “slide down the steps, like a kid.” Calls to the building management about a repair timeline went unanswered, he said.
Growing up in the building in the 1980s, Rodriguez recalled the previous landlord as a friendly and responsive neighborhood presence.
“This felt like a home before,” Rodriguez said. “Now they treat us the same as the rats.”
A large rodent had recently chewed a hole through his couch cushion. He handled the extermination himself, with a two-by-four.
Recently, tenants received a clue about their landlord, following the partial collapse of another Bronx building. The man identified in news stories as the owner of that building, David Kleiner, shared a Brooklyn office with their building manager, Binyomin Herzl.
A handful of tenants visited each of the building’s 72 units, logging an array of decrepit conditions and unusual alterations.
“We didn’t want to become the next news story,” said Yuldosheva, pointing to a crack in the wall of a bedroom shared by her three children — a result, she feared, of the subway that rumbles just below her windows.
Lawsuits show that Herzl has been ordered to pay more than $100,000 for violations across at least six Bronx buildings, several of which were found by a judge to pose an imminent hazard.
Reached by phone, Herzl said he didn't own any of those properties, but simply acted as a middleman between tenants and the true owners, whom he declined to list. “There’s no one landlord,” he said. “It’s a group of investors.”
Kleiner, who was previously featured on the city’s “worst landlord” list, confirmed his partial ownership of 705 Gerard in a brief phone call, but declined further comment.
Herzl, meanwhile, attributed the tenants’ complaints to “normal wear and tear” of a nearly century old building. He said Mamdani should focus on improving the city’s public housing, rather than going after private landlords.
“Our buildings look like five star hotels against his,” he added.
When landlords refuse to address a serious violation, like heat or hot water outages, the city can step in and order repairs, then bill the owner directly.
In the last three years, inspectors have ordered emergency repairs at 38 buildings that list either Herzl or Kleiner as an owner, according to records provided by the city’s housing department. The men have been billed $446,521 for those repairs.
Mamdani has proposed using such fines as a vehicle to bring distressed rental properties under city stewardship, by aggressively pursuing liens on delinquent landlords and buying up their portfolios through foreclosure auctions.
Just as the city can shut down unsanitary restaurants, Mamdani has said, landlords that “repeatedly put New Yorkers at risk will not be allowed to operate in New York City — with no exceptions."
In reality, the process is resource-intensive and legally fraught. It is made more complex by the nest of LLCs often used by landlords to obfuscate the full scope of their portfolios, according to Cea Weaver, director of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.
“It’d be great to have a better sense of who owns the buildings that we are regulating and overseeing,” she said.
State legislation that would have made it easier to identify LLC owners was recently vetoed by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul amid pressure from landlords.
Kenny Burgos, the CEO of the New York Apartment Association, a landlord lobbying group, said Mamdani’s tenant proposals — including freezing the rent for regulated tenants — would force landlords to cut back on maintenance and services.
“That’s going to take away from the elevator budget, the boiler budget, the heating budget,” he said. “It’s a question of math: These buildings are crumbling because of policy, not because of bad landlords.”
He characterized the rental rip-off hearings as “show trials” that took a “tribal approach” to the city’s affordable housing crisis.
Despite the combative branding — “New Yorkers vs. Bad Landlords,” blares one promotion — the Bronx event mostly resembled a standard constituent service night: City officials fielded questions about local laws, helped residents with paperwork and connected them to service providers.
Maitin left feeling “glad to be heard by someone who can actually do something about the problem,” but felt it was too early to tell “if it’s all talk."
The next morning, she was surprised to find the building’s superintendent applying a fresh coat of paint to a staircase. Outside, workers were removing scaffolding that had been in front of the building for years.
“I think they caught wind of the rental rip-off,” Maitin said. “They’re scared.”
FILE - New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks to reporters during a news conference in New York, Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)
FILE - New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks during a Rental Ripoff Hearing at Fordham University on Wednesday, March 11, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki, File)
Gulhayo Yuldosheva's children get ready for school in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)
Francisco Medina, left, cleans his apartment next to his relative, Maria Frias, right, in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)
Gulhayo Yuldosheva, 33 , center right, Marina Quiroz, 65, top, pose for a portrait with other two residents in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)
Tommy Rodriguez, right, talks to his relative, Francisco Medina, left, in an apartment building where tenants report maintenance issues and pest infestations, in the Bronx borough of New York, Tuesday, March 17, 2026. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)
Marina Quiroz stands in her living room in a Bronx apartment building, where tenants report maintenance issues, pest infestations, Tuesday, March 17, 2026, in New York. (AP Photo/Andres Kudacki)
