By Bo Gu, NBC News

It’s a harrowing plot: Two coal miners looking to make a quick buck lure a young man into working with them, intending to murder him. They plan on pretending his death was an accident, and then demanding a large compensation package from the mine owner.

But by the end of the 2003 film “Blind Shaft,” one of the two miners can’t bear to kill an innocent soul. He ends up killing his partner, and the targeted boy survives.

But in reality, potential victims aren’t always as lucky.

On the evening of March 11th, at a lead-zinc mine in China’s southern province of Jiangxi, a migrant worker named Ji Lu Shi Ge was killed when he fell 120 feet from a vent, landing on a cart. He had only worked at the mine for eight days before the accident happened.

Li Xiangtang, head of Dongxiang Lead-Zinc Mining Co, Ltd which owns the mines, thought it was a coincidence that he had just bought insurance for the miners three days earlier. Ji Lu Shi Ge’s relatives were contacted through other migrant workers at the mine who knew Ji in Sichuan Province, where they were from, and compensation talks began. The "relatives" wanted 1.2 million yuan – roughly $180,000.

A few things soon aroused Li’s suspicion: None of them seemed particularly sad. They refused to have an autopsy conducted. And they came to the bargaining table with a death certificate from the deceased’s hometown, a move that made them look a little too well-prepared. There were also questions about the accident itself: The worker fell from the vent, a place he wasn’t supposed to be working at all.

Local police from Sichuan Province got involved. The victim, whose real name was not Ji Lu Shi Ge, was a mentally disabled man. Police issued murder charges against nine people who they said bought the man from a farmer from Leibo County, Sichuan Province in October 2010.

Nobody knows the man’s real name, age, or where he was originally from. He was sold for about $800. Out of the nine people in the scheme, some faked the man’s ID, some pretended to be his "hometown mates" looking for mining jobs, some claimed they were his relatives, and some made the push at the vent that killed him. Other miners said the victim was a very quiet man who never talked to anyone else, and did whatever he was told to do.

Worse than a murder
This isn’t the first time “Blind Shaft” played out in the real world. Other cases were reported in China in 2007, 2008 and 2009 with similar plots: mentally disabled men lured to work at mines die in "accidents," and relatives ask for high compensations. And many of these people seem to come from the same place: Leibo County in Sichuan province.

Leibo is one of China’s poorest places, with many farmers earning a mere 100 dollars a year. Many local farmers leave to make a better living far from home. Ma Ping, director of Politics and Law Committee of Leibo government, told the Shanghai-based Xinmin Weekly that there had been more than 20 requests for investigations into forged mine accidents from all over China since 2007. In Leibo, it’s common for some local residents to "adopt" mentally disabled people, who are sometimes bought from others. The mentally disabled people in these cases were then bought by more strangers who transported them to faraway places to work illegally. Last year, when 11 of such ill people were sold to Xinjiang province from unauthorized charitable organizations to work at a local factory, a series of photos of them caused an uproar online. The workers were not paid and were treated poorly.

According to Xinmin Weekly’s report, in 2009, Leibo Public Security launched a campaign on illegal "adoption" of the mentally disabled, and rescued dozens of them. Some of their origins were impossible to trace, and they had to be sent to mental hospitals.

China still remains the most dangerous place to be a miner. Thousands of miners die in disasters like gas explosions or underground water inundation every year. In 2003 alone, over 6,000 miners died in accidents in China, comprising 80 percent of the mining disaster death toll worldwide. There’re no specific statistics on the death toll each year, but based on reports from news outlets, it is estimated over 50,000 miners have died in the past ten years in China. The central government has been making efforts to curb illegally operated private mines and improve working conditions in the past few years, and the State Administration of Work Safety claimed early this year that 2,433 miners died in 2010, a 7.5% drop compared to 2009. However, the real figure could be higher since it’s a common practice for mine owners to bribe reporters and give relatives compensations (usually around $30,000) to keep them quiet.

The critically acclaimed “Blind Shaft” has won at least twelve awards, but the movie has not been approved for release in China.