A rescue operation is underway to save 12 miners who were trapped in a coal mine in Pakistan following a gas explosion.
Abdul Ghani, a mines inspector, said the explosion occurred on Thursday night in Singidi, a town in Balochistan province around 40km from the provincial capital of Quetta.
He said rescue workers had been carefully removing debris from the mine for hours but they had not reached any of the miners yet.
“An operation has been launched to extract the miners. Efforts are being made to pull all the miners out alive,” he told the Dawn newspaper.
The explosion was caused by an accumulation of methane gas, the provincial mining department said.
Shahid Rind, spokesperson for the Balochistan government, said all available resources were being used to save the miners. He added that an investigation had been ordered to determine the cause of the mine’s collapse.
Mining accidents and explosions, blamed mainly on lax safety standards, have killed dozens of coal workers in Pakistan in recent years.
In June last year, 11 miners died after inhaling methane gas inside a coal mine in the Sanjdi area. Authorities said the miners were working around 1,500 ft deep when the methane gas escaped and spread. The mine owner was booked for alleged negligence the next day, according to media reports.
A few months earlier, in March, almost a dozen miners had died in a gas explosion in Balochistan.
Pakistani security forces on Thursday, meanwhile, rescued at least half of the 16 miners who had been kidnapped by militants in Balochistan.
The restive southeastern province is home to several separatist groups that accuse the federal government of unfairly exploiting local natural resources like oil and minerals, and routinely target resource extraction projects.
