Advisor to Turkish prime minister kicks protestors after mine disaster

Women sang improvised ballads about the departed over freshly dug graves, even as backhoes carved row upon row of graves into the dirt and hearses lined up outside the cemetery with more victims of Turkey’s worst mining disaster.

Rescue teams recovered another eight victims, raising the death toll to 282, with some 142 people still unaccounted for, according to government figures. The disaster on Tuesday has set off protests around Turkey and thrown Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s presidential ambitions off stride. Blackening his reputation further, one of Erdogan’s aides was accused of kicking a protester on the ground.

At a graveyard in the western town of Soma, where coal mining has been the main industry for decades, women wailed loudly in an improvised display of mourning. They swayed and sang songs about their relatives as the bodies were taken from coffins and lowered into their graves. Pictures of the lost relatives were pinned onto their clothing.