A fire raced through a coal mine in eastern Ukraine today, killing 33 miners trapped hundreds of metres underground in the latest of many mining tragedies to plague the ex-Soviet state.
"They have found their bodies, they are all dead," a spokesman for the Emergencies Ministry in Ukraine's capital Kiev told Reuters.
Twenty-nine firefighting teams were still battling the blaze 12 hours after it broke out overnight about 570 metres (1,800 feet) underground in the ageing Donbass coalfield. Officials said they had been pushed back by flames and thick smoke.
At least 70 other miners were saved from the burning mine.
Firefighters had said they were encountering difficulty reaching one area of the pit.
Ukrainian media said a fire had also broken out overnight in a coalmine further west near the town of Krivih Rih. Sixty men working underground were safely brought to the surface and the fire was extinguished.
About 300 miners died last year in Ukraine's ageing and deep coal mines, plagued by poor working conditions, a lax regard for safety rules and lack of funds for modernisation.
In 2000, at least 80 miners were killed and seven injured when a methane gas explosion ripped through the Barakova coal mine in the eastern town of Luhansk in the country's worst mining disaster since independence in 1991.