Siberian Mine Deaths Rise to 105

Rescuers searching a coalmine hit by a methane gas explosion found several more bodies today, bringing the death toll to 105 in Russia's worst mining disaster in a decade.

President Vladimir Putin ordered an inquiry into the accident alongside separate investigations into a plane crash at the weekend and a fire in an old peoples' home in southern Russian earlier today.

Almost 200 people were killed in the three incidents.

The worst was the explosion yesterday at the Ulyanovskaya mine, in the Kemerovo region of Siberia.

A British consultant, Ian Robertson, from the German-British International Mining Consultancy (IMC), is feared to be among the 105 victims.

Mr Robertson, accompanied by an interpreter and senior managers at the mine, was carrying out an inspection. They were examining a British-made hazard-monitoring system just prior to the blast, which occurred 270m below ground.

Emergency officials said 93 people were rescued earlier, while five others are still missing. At one point they said there were 106 confirmed deaths, but later revised the figure without explanation.

The large mine is located in the city of Novokuznetsk, almost 2,000 miles east of Moscow. Yuzhkuzbassugol, an affiliate of the Russian coal and steel company Evraz Group SA, operates the facility.

The incident was the latest, and deadliest, to highlight the precarious and hazardous state of Russia's mining industry, which fell into disrepair when government subsidies dried up after the Soviet collapse.

A blast at a mine on the outskirts of Novokuznetsk killed 47 workers in 2004, and another methane explosion killed 67 in the same region in 1997.

Mr Putin said: "The information about this terrible tragedy at the Ulyanovskaya pit echoes in the hearts of Russians with pain."

He led a minute's silence dedicated to all three tragedies.

"You have to do your best to investigate the reasons at the highest level ... and to draw corresponding conclusions," Reuters reported him saying.

Six people died in the plane crash on Saturday morning in Samara, 500 miles south-east of Moscow.

The fire in the nursing home killed 62 people today, in the Azoz Sea coast village of Kamyshevatskaya. A night watchman ignored two fire alarms before reporting the blaze.