Three feared dead in northeast India mine accident
Al Jazeera
Rescue operations still under way as nine others remain trapped in flooded Assam coal mine.
Three miners are feared dead inside a flooded coal mine in the northeastern Indian state of Assam, with rescue efforts ongoing to save nine others.
Rescue teams have spotted three bodies but have not been able to recover them yet, the local authorities in Assam’s hilly Dima Hasao district said in a statement on Tuesday. Twelve miners were trapped when water flooded the mine on Monday.
The Indian military said in a statement it has deployed divers, helicopters and engineers to help rescue the trapped men.
“The mine got flooded yesterday — the source was internal. They [the miners] probably hit some water channel and water came out and flooded it,” Mayank Kumar, district police chief in Dima Hasao, told the Reuters news agency.
Workers were “feared trapped 300 feet [91 metres] below the ground after water gushed in from a nearby unused mine”, Assam’s Mines Minister Kaushik Rai said.
