AFP December 6, 2007
Beijing - The death toll from China's latest major coal mine disaster rose to 105 on Friday, official media said, as hope for survivors dwindled and anger mounted over a litany of mistakes that led to the tragedy.
Twenty-six more bodies were recovered on Friday morning from the mine in northern China's Shanxi province, the state-run Xinhua news agency said.
Xinhua had previously reported that 79 bodies had been recovered following a gas explosion at the Ruizhiyuan mine late on Wednesday night.
Fifteen miners had earlier been rescued or escaped from the mine.
However, the State Administration of Mine Safety said on Friday it remained unclear how many people remained missing.
"We still don't know the exact numbers who are trapped. We are trying to clarify that," administration spokeswoman An Yuanjie told AFP.
An said that those who remained underground were likely to be dead.
"The chances of them surviving are very small because it was a gas explosion," she said.
Official media on Friday said the colliery's managers were responsible for the accident because they allowed mining in an unauthorised area of the site in an effort to extract more coal than their licence allowed.
Compounding their mistakes, they allegedly failed to report the accident for more than five hours because they wanted to conduct rescue operations themselves. And An added that the people the operators did send down were not properly trained in such operations.
This wasted the best time for rescue work and magnified the number of casualties, officials at the local rescue headquarters said, according to Xinhua.
"They sent rescue teams down the shaft but they were not professional rescue teams... this made the accident even worse," An said.
She added on Thursday that some of the people involved in the initial rescue work were among those unaccounted for. However, on Friday she said it was unclear exactly how many of them remained missing.
Police have detained the mine's boss and legal representative, Xinhua said.
Copyright © 2007 AFP.
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