Rescuers recovered late on Sunday the body of the last five Bosnian miners who were killed after an earthquake triggered a collapse at the central Raspotocje mine and trapped 34 miners half a kilometer below the surface.
In the third such accident this year, a 3.5-magnitude earthquake on Thursday near the central Bosnian town of Zenica caused rocks in the mine to fracture explosively, sealing off the miners in an underground passage.
Twenty-nine miners were pulled out alive within the first 24 hours and the bodies of four of the dead were recovered on Saturday.
After digging for 80 hours through tight underground corridors filled with methane, emergency teams on Sunday night reached the body of the last miner who was buried under piles of earth, said mine manager Esad Civic.
A joint prayer for the five men and the burial would be held later on Monday in Zenica.
A day of national mourning was declared in Bosnia’s autonomous Bosniak-Croat Federation, where the mine is located.
The Federation Chief Mining Inspector, Nuraga Duranovic, said that the miners most probably suffocated from poisonous gases released in the air after the rock burst.
Sixteen people have been injured in previous accidents this year, and experts said that Raspotocje was the most dangerous of all Bosnia’s coal mines because of frequent rock bursts caused by tremors at its deep underground pits. 39 miners died in a rock burst at the mine in 1982.
The mine had been among the best equipped in the region before the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, but was damaged by shelling in the Bosnian war and had not been substantially upgraded since.
In 2009, the Federation government merged seven coal mines, including Raspotocje, with EPBiH to supply its coal-fired plants, and the utility pledged to invest more than 200 million Bosnian Marka ($135 million) over five years to improve working conditions.
Some of the miners who survived the Thursday’s accident have said they would not return to work.
The Civic said that management and trade union would request additional funding and investment from EPBiH to improve the work conditions and safety of miners at Raspotocje.