All 26 missing in Russia’s mining accident dead: Company

All the 26 miners, listed as missing after an accident at a coal pit in northern Russia, have lost their lives, says the company that runs the colliery.

“According to the expert technical council, 26 people who were in the mine had no chances of surviving,” Tatyana Bushkova, a spokeswoman for the Vorkutaugol mining firm said in a statement released on Sunday.

Bushkova further noted that a rescue mission has been halted at the Severnaya mine, located in the city of Vorkuta in the Komi region above the Arctic Circle, where the incident took place on Thursday due to a sudden leak of methane gas.

A total of 110 people were in the mine at the time of the accident, 80 of whom were rescued, 26 went missing and four others were killed, according to earlier reports.

“Unfortunately, we are forced to acknowledge that all the conditions at that section of the mine would not allow a person to survive,” Russia’s Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov said in remarks broadcast by LifeNews television channel.

In another development on Sunday, a third blast rocked the coal mine, killing six people, five of them rescuers.

The incident at Severnaya appears to be Russia’s worst mining accident over the past few years.

In 2010, 91 people, including miners and rescuers, died after a methane explosion at the Raspadskaya mine in the Siberian region of Kemerovo. In 2007, 110 people were also killed at the Ulyanovskaya mine in the same region.