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China mine bosses jailed after gas blast kills 166

Iran Materials 29 November 2006 13:52 (UTC +04:00)

(Reuters) - A Chinese court jailed two managers of a state-owned coal mine on Wednesday for negligence two years after a gas explosion killed 166 miners, Xinhua news agency said.

The blast, one of the worst in China in decades, hit the Chenjiashan coal mine in Tongchuan in the northwestern province of Shaanxi just days after the pit had caught fire.

Mine manager Liu Shuangming was jailed for 5- years and his deputy and chief engineer, Wang Youjun, was jailed for five years, Xinhua said.

"After the fire was put out, (they) ordered the miners to risk their lives resuming production without sufficient safety measures," Xinhua said. "Their action was extremely outrageous."

Also on Wednesday, an appeals court in the farwest region of Xinjiang upheld a lower court's June sentencing of five managers and technicians of a coal mine to jail terms from three to six years for a gas blast that killed 83 last year, it said.

China has the world's deadliest coal mining industry with fatal accidents on an almost daily basis as safety regulations are ignored and production is pushed beyond limits in the rush for profit, reports Trend.

Even on Wednesday, 11 miners were killed in a gas explosion in Gansu province, neighboring Shaanxi, Xinhua said, adding 27 miners managed to escape. Authorities had yet to confirm how many people were trapped underground.

Four coal mine accidents killed at least 88 people across the country just over the weekend.

Nearly 6,000 coal miners died in about 3,300 floods, blasts and other accidents in 2005, and the death toll for the first 10 months of 2006 stood at 3,726.

Officials say small and privately run coal mines that fall short of safety standards account for most of the casualties, but large state-owned mines report the higher death tolls.

A gas blast in a state coal mine killed 214 in the northeastern province of Liaoning in February 2005, while 171 died in a similar accident in Heilongjiang province last November

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