Gas explosion in Chinese coal mine kills 203

SHANGHAI, China - A gas explosion in a coal mine in China's northeast killed at least 203 miners, the government said today, in the deadliest such disaster reported since communist rule began in 1949.

The explosion Monday afternoon at the Sunjiawan mine in Liaoning province also injured 22 miners and trapped 13 underground, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

The cause of the blast, which occurred 794 feet underground, was under investigation, it said.

China has suffered a string of deadly mining disasters in recent months despite a nationwide safety crackdown.

A blast in northern China's Shaanxi province in November killed 166 miners. Another explosion in October killed 148. Before that, the deadliest recent reported mining accident was a fire in southern China that killed 162 miners in 2000.

The disaster in Liaoning was the deadliest disclosed by the Chinese government since the 1949 communist revolution. However, until the late 1990s, when the government began regularly announcing statistics on mining deaths, many industrial accidents were never reported.

In 1942, China's northeast was the scene of the world's deadliest coal mining disaster when an accident killed 1,549 miners in Japanese-occupied Manchuria during World War II.

The explosion at Sunjiawan happened about 10 minutes after an earthquake shook the mine, Xinhua said, citing Zhang Yunfu, vice general manager of the Fuxin mine group.

China's mines are by far the world's deadliest, with more than 6,000 deaths last year in floods, explosions and fires.

Mine owners and local officials are frequently blamed for putting profits ahead of safety, especially as the nation's soaring energy needs increase demand for coal.

The Sunjiawan mine in the Fuxin region has an annual production capacity of 1.5 million tons, Xinhua said.

Fuxin is one of China's oldest coal mining regions and many of its mines already have been depleted, according to state media reports. Miners in many such regions must tunnel far underground to reach coal seams and the risk of explosion due to methane gas is high.