2010-08-02 08:28

A rescue worker walks through the debris from a huge explosion on July 31 near staff quarters of a coal mine in Linfen city of Shanxi province. [YAN YAN / XINHUA]

BEIJING - The death toll from an explosion at a coal mine in Linfen city of North China's Shanxi province early on Saturday has risen to 17 after another two bodies were found, local authorities said on Sunday.

The blast at Liugou Coal Mine of Yicheng county also left 104 injured, seven of them seriously, as of 11 pm on Saturday, said Wang Jianshe, head of the county's People's Hospital, where the injured were admitted for treatment and reported to be in stable condition.

The accident occurred when an unknown amount of "illegal explosives" stored near miners' dormitories went off early on Saturday morning in Longhua town of Linfen city in Shanxi, the local government said.

The blast, which locals described as having "struck like an earthquake" left a crater measuring 20 meters wide and 5 meters deep.

The Guangzhou-based Yangcheng Evening News reported that the force of the blast flattened six rows of dormitory buildings and shattered glass in neighboring villages more than 10 kilometers away.

According to the report, most of the 17 victims were migrant miners from Hubei, Hunan and Henan provinces, along with some of their relatives who came to see them in the summer vacation.

Publicity officials of Yicheng county, which administers the township, said the State-run Yangquan Coal Industry (Group) Co Ltd had recently taken over the mine from a private owner during a reorganization of the local coal mining industry.

The Yangcheng Evening News quoted a miner named Cheng Shengcheng as saying that although the mine "seemed to have stopped operation", they were asked to "dig coal covertly during the night".

The group company, Linfen city government, as well as provincial and city-level work safety bureaus and administrations of mining safety were all unavailable for comment on Sunday.

Xinhua News Agency reported police had detained a suspect without identifying the detainee.

Yicheng county police said the scene of the explosion had been sealed off and that they could not explain how such a large amount of explosives could have been hidden.

In a separate incident on Saturday, an accident at a coal mine in Northeast China's Jixi city, Heilongjiang province, trapped 24 miners in the flooded pit and rescue workers raced against time to find them on Sunday.

The city government said the accident at Hengxinyuan Mine occurred at 1:30 pm on Saturday, trapping the miners on four different levels of the pit.

Li Zhanshu, governor of Heilongjiang, has ordered the efforts to pump water from the shaft be speeded up.

The mine had been earmarked for closure by the end of the year.

Two officials have been sacked from their posts following the accident in Jixi. Fang Dongchu, director of the Jixi municipal coal mine safety bureau, said Qin Xuyuan, a deputy head in Hengshan who was in charge of work safety, and Zhang Yidong, director of the district's coal mining bureau, were fired for dereliction of duty.

The managers of the Hengxinyuan mine are in police custody, Fang added.