ASTANA, September 20 (RIA Novosti) - At least 18 people died and 25 are missing in a coal mine fire Wednesday morning in central Kazakhstan, a mining company representative said.
"At the moment, 18 bodies have been found and 25 people still remain below ground, and presumably they are also dead," Grigory Present, the director of the coal department with the Mittal Steel Temirtau company, said.
He added that at the moment of the incident, 374 people were working at the coal mine in Karaganda, southeast of the country's capital, Astana.
"Rescue work has stopped for the moment, and the bodies have not yet been recovered due to the high gas contamination [in the mine] and the high temperature," Present said.
The incident in Kazakhstan was not the only one Wednesday. In Ukraine, 13 people died following an explosion at a mine in the east of the country.
