At least 16 dead, over 20 missing in Siberian mine blast

May 24, 2007, 7:19 GMT

Moscow - Sixteen people were reported dead and 21 remained missing after a mine blast in Russia's Siberian region of Kemerovo, officials said Thursday, two months after a blast killed 110 at a nearby mine.

'According to the data as of 10:45 am Moscow time (0745 GMT), 16 people had died in the mine,' a spokesman for Russia's Emergency Situations Ministry told the Russian news agency Interfax.

The unidentified spokesman said 217 people had been in the Yubileinaya mine, some 3,000 kilometres east of Moscow, when the methane gas-fuelled explosion occurred.

He added that 180 had been brought safely to the surface, leaving 21 unaccounted for.

Local prosecutors were to decide whether to open a criminal investigation into the explosion, and Russia's federal agency for technical and atomic safety said it had created a special commission to investigate the blast.

'The commission is in place and has already begun work,' an unidentified spokesman was quoted by Russian agencies as saying.

The agency added that the Yubileinaya mine had been closed after a number of violations were uncovered following the March methane blast at the Ulyanovsk mine, which like Yubileinaya is owned by the Yuzhkuzbassugol mining company.

All the violations were addressed, and a court allowed the Yubileinaya mine to resume work, the spokesman said.

But agency representatives said Yuzhkuzbassugol, which is owned by oligarch Roman Abramovich's Evraz Group, could lose its license.

Both mines are located in the coal-heavy area of central Siberia known as the Kuzbass, a Soviet-era industrial centre where that fuel has been mined for more than 150 years.

Many of the region's mines date back to Soviet times and have recorded a number of accidents in recent years. In 2005, 25 people died in a single mine explosion, and 47 perished in a blast in 2004.

In 1997, the final toll of an explosion was put at 67, but March's explosion is thought to be the most deadly.

That explosion led to the immediate closing of eight Russian mines where safety violations had been revealed. An additional 10 received mandates to address violations.