COLOMBIA: Rescue workers recovered 23 of 31 miners who died in an explosion and Uribe visits mine and talks to miners

Rescue workers in Colombia recover the bodies of 23 of 31 miners who died in an explosion and President Alvaro Uribe visits the area. Rescue workers in north-eastern Colombia recovered on Sunday (February 4) the bodies of 23 miners killed in a Saturday (February 3) coal mine explosion and continued searching for another eight miners who were believed dead. Rescue and recovery attempts, complicated by deadly gases remaining in the mine shafts, resumed before daybreak on Sunday (February 4) after being suspended the night before. Onlookers watched the grim sight of workers carrying stretchers with the miners' corpses being carried out of the La Preciosa mine in the early morning hours of Sunday. Dozens of rescue officials and red cross workers organized the search for thirteen miners who were still unaccounted for in the rural mine in Norte de Santander (400 km northeast of Bogota), near the Venezuelan border. Relatives and co-workers gathered, waited and watched. The explosion was apparently the result of the accumulation of combustible gases. President Alvaro Uribe visited the mine, talked to miners and said mining officials had assured him that all employees were covered by social security. Uribe promised to use government funds to help relatives if any was not covered by social security. La Preciosa produces coal for domestic consumption. A similar accident occurred in the town of El Zulia, also in the mountainous province of Norte de Santander, when a coal mine explosion killed 15 people in 2001. Norte de Santander, near the Venezuelan border, is an area contested by left-wing rebels and far-right paramilitary militias fighting a decades-old guerrilla war. Both groups, branded terrorists by Washington, fight over control of cocaine smuggling routes from the province into neighbouring Venezuela.

ITN Source | February 5, 2007

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