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Ruda Slaska, Poland: All 23 Polish miners caught in a gas explosion underground in a mine in southern Poland were confirmed dead on Thursday, in the country's worst mining disaster since the 1970s.
Rescuers had worked through two nights in a desperate search for the men, most of whom were in the pit in the town of Ruda Slaska, about 300 km southwest of Warsaw, to retrieve machinery.
"I can confirm that the efforts to rescue the men have come to an end," spokesman for Polish state coal company Kompania Weglowa, Zbigniew Madej said.
"We have found the bodies of 23 men. Everything suggests they died at the moment of the explosion."
The death toll is the Polish industry's highest since a blast at another Silesia mine in 1979 killed 34, PAP news agency reported.
Earlier, the search had gone on on for the last two miners trapped after the underground methane gas explosion at the mine, but the officials had all but ruled out finding them alive.
Rescue work had been suspended on Wednesday because conditions were too dangerous due to high levels of methane gas still in the Halemba mine, one of the oldest in Poland.
"We have now found 21 bodies altogether. The chances for the other two are almost non-existent," Zbigniew Madej, spokesman for the state-owned company Polish Coal Co., had told reporters.
The miners were in a shaft more than 1 km underground when the blast occurred.
Poland's state-run mining industry, built up before the fall of communism in 1989 and starved of investment for years, has suffered hundreds of deaths over the last few decades.
President Lech Kaczynski, who visited the mine on Wednesday, told told reporters there would be a public inquiry into the cause of the disaster.
The Halemba mine, in operation since 1957, lies at the heart of the Silesia region's industrial belt that has been the scene of several disasters. In 1990, 19 miners were killed in the same pit by a gas explosion.
Poland is the biggest coal producer in the EU, with an output of 98 million tonnes of coal last year, or 57 per cent of the toal mined in the 25-member bloc.
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