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Russian mine blast kills 13, injures 23
A methane blast in a mineshaft in Russia's Siberia killed 13 people and injured 23 on Thursday, a spokesman for the Emergencies Ministry said. The blast ripped through the mine as a repair team was patching up part of the Listvyazhnaya mine, near Russia's border with Mongolia. The ministry spokesman said 67 out of 103 miners inside the mine escaped unharmed. Officials said it was too early to say what caused the methane to explode. Accidents are common in Russia's loss-making collieries, many of which date back to dictator Josef Stalin's 1920s industrialisation drive and where safety procedures are largely unchanged since Soviet times. A blast in the Kemerovo region in April killed 45 miners, and a flooded mineshaft last October trapped 11 miners underground for a week in a mine near Ukraine. But the owner of Listvyazhnaya said there were no reasons to believe that poor maintenance of the shaft or faulty equipment could be blamed for Thursday's blast. "It is too early to make suggestions about what caused the blast," a spokeswoman for private mining company Belon told Ekho Moskvy radio. Belon bought Listvyazhnaya in 2002. "It is too early to say that worn-out equipment could have been the cause," she added. "We do not rule out that human error could be at fault, because the mine had a good record of blast safety and work organisation. |
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