Coal mine explosion in China kills 90 people, state media say

A gas explosion at a coal mine In the Chinese province of Shanxi (north), at least 90 people were killed, state media announced on Saturday, in the deadliest mining accident in recent years in the country.

The official Xinhua News Agency said the accident at the Liushenyu coal mine in Changzhi city occurred on Friday evening. Approximately 247 workers were on duty at that time.

Nine minors were still missing as of Saturday afternoon, Xinhua said, and more than 120 people were hospitalized.

The cause of the explosion is under investigation, Xinhua reported, and rescue operations are continuing with hundreds of rescuers and medical personnel dispatched to the scene. Many of the injured were injured by toxic gas, according to state media CCTV.

Chinese President Xi Jinping called for an all-out effort to rescue the missing, Xinhua reported.

Xi also called for “proper handling of the consequences of the accident and called for a thorough investigation into its causes, with prosecution in accordance with the law,” the news agency said.

Xinhua later reported that “those responsible for the company involved in the mining accident have been placed under control,” citing the local emergency management office.

The coal mine, operated by Shanxi Tongzhou Coal & Coke Group with an annual production capacity of 1.2 million tonnes, was included in a national list of disaster-prone coal mines by the China National Mine Safety Administration in 2024 for its “high gas content”.

Shanxi province is known as the main coal mining province. With a size larger than Greece and a population of around 34 million, the province’s hundreds of thousands of miners extracted 1.3 billion tonnes of coal last year, almost a third of China’s total.

In February 2023, 53 people were killed after an open-cast mine collapsed in northern China’s Inner Mongolia region. In November 2009, a mine explosion in northeast China’s Heilongjiang province killed 108 people, according to state media.