QUETTA: At least five miners and two rescue officials died of suffocation after methane gas accumulated in a coal mine in Quetta, officials said Tuesday.
The fire took place at a mine in Harnai late on Monday, said Sohail Anwer Hashmi, an official with the provincial government, Al Jazeera reported.
“The miners entered inside the mine to fill the cracks caused by [the] fire, but they died of asphyxia caused by the deadly methane gas,” Hashmi said.
“The coal miners were working 1,400 feet [427 metres] deep inside the mine when the incident [was] reported,” he said.
The bodies were recovered after rescue operations through the night, Hashmi said.
It was the second mine disaster in the region within a week. Last week, six miners were killed in a blast at a coal mine in minerals-rich Balochistan.
The dead were among eight miners trapped about 1,000 feet underground when accumulating methane gas exploded at the coal field in Marwar.
In the past year alone, 102 coal miners have been killed in Balochistan in 72 different incidents, Sultan Muhammad Lala, president of the Balochistan Coal Mines Workers Federation, said.
Lala said the government and mine owners were not ensuring safe working conditions at the sites.
An explosion caused by methane gas at another coal mine in Marwar in May 2018 killed 20 workers. In August that year, another methane-fueled explosion in Quetta killed seven.
In 2011, 45 coal miners were killed by a methane gas explosion, also in Balochistan.
