NEW YORK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Five of the world’s largest tech companies have been accused of being complicit in the death of children in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) forced to mine cobalt, a metal used to make telephones and computers, in a landmark lawsuit.“These companies - the richest companies in the world, these fancy gadget-making companies - have allowed children to be maimed and killed to get their cheap cobalt,” Terrence Collingsworth, an attorney representing the families, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.The lawsuit said the children, some as young as 6 years old, were forced by their families’ extreme poverty to leave school and work in cobalt mining owned by the British mining company Glencore.In response to a request for comment, Dell said in an email that it has “never knowingly sourced operations” using child labor and has launched an investigation into the allegations.More than 40 million people have been estimated to be captive in modern slavery, which includes forced labor and forced marriage, according to Walk Free and the International Labour Organization."