Police are investigating the lynching of a reporter near an unlicensed coalmine in Hunyuan County of Datong city in North China's Shanxi Province on January 9, reports China Youth Daily.

Lan Chengzhang, 30, a stringer for China Trade News in Shanxi, and two other reporters were beaten up by thugs, which the coalmine boss had allegedly hired, Southern Metropolis Daily reported on Tuesday.

Lan died of cerebral hemorrhage in a Datong hospital the next day, and the other two ended up with broken legs, the paper's press department director, surnamed Wang, said yesterday.

It's still not clear why Lan visited the coalmine, and his colleague, who didn't want to be named, told China Youth Daily that he hadn't informed the paper's Shanxi bureau about it beforehand.

"It's highly possible that he had gone to blackmail the boss for illegal mining activities," he said.

But the division chief of Datong Administration of Press and Publications, Liu Dongyue, told Changsha-based Rednet.cn on Tuesday that Lan was registered as a reporter.

The Datong authorities, in fact, issued a public notice on January 10 to prevent reporters, who don't hold a press card issued by the administration, from visiting any site or reporting an incident.

The notice was issued to warn the public against "fake reporters", of which Liu believes there are many in Datong and the rest of the country.