KIEV, 8 July — A pit blaze trapped and killed 35 coal miners in eastern Ukraine in the early hours of yesterday.

“Thirty people were in a trolley that was going down and three others were found near it, killed by smoke inhalation,” said a spokesman for the Emergency Situations Ministry. “They have found their bodies, they are all dead.”

Officials said rescue efforts later turned up the body of two miners, who were not supposed to be working at the time, bringing the death toll to 35.

It was the latest of many mining tragedies to plague the ex-Soviet state, and came just hours after President Leonid Kuchma spoke about the problems faced by the country’s ailing coal industry on Saturday.

Twenty-nine firefighting teams were still battling the blaze 12 hours after it broke out overnight about 570 meters underground in the aging Donbass coalfield, at the Ukraina mine in the town of Ukrainsk, where 107 miners were working. Officials said they had been pushed back by flames and thick smoke.

The fire started before dawn in a conveyor belt section. Even in the early stages of the blaze, officials said there was little hope of finding the miners alive.

Firefighters had said they were encountering difficulty reaching one area of the pit.

Ukrainian media said a fire had also broken out overnight on Saturday in a coal mine further west near the town of Krivih Rih. Sixty men working underground were safely brought to the surface and the fire was extinguished.

While rescuers tried to bring the bodies to the surface, a special government commission led by Deputy Prime Minister Oleh Dubyna headed for Donetsk to investigate the accident.

As television pictures showed shocked and distressed miners debating the causes of the inferno around the rusting colliery, President Leonid Kuchma sent condolences to the families of those who died. Some were as young as 25.

Kuchma’s press spokeswoman said the president had vowed to do everything “to urgently find out the reasons” for the fire, which broke out about 570 meters below the surface.

More than 3,700 miners have died in Ukraine’s deep and aging coal mines, plagued by poor working conditions, a lax regard for safety rules and lack of funds for modernization since independence in 1991. The State Labor Safety Committee reported 116 miners have been killed in job-related incidents in Ukraine from January to June this year. Last August, a methane gas explosion at the Zasiadko mine in the city of Donetsk killed 54 people.

About 300 miners died last year, and in 2000 at least 80 miners were killed and seven injured when a methane gas explosion ripped through the Barakova coal mine in the eastern town of Luhansk, in the country’s worst mining disaster since independence.

A top-level investigating team dispatched to the site was bound to raise again the question of what to do about Ukraine’s aging pits, where on average six people die for every million tons of coal produced.

Ukraine’s mines are expensive and dangerous to operate, but politicians fear even greater social costs of closing pits which employ 450,000 people at 193 mines in areas with few alternative jobs.

Miners, still wearing their red helmets, fought back tears, smoking together in small groups outside the shaft. The more than 70 who were rescued were receiving treatment.

Bereaved families said management had sent miners down for the morning shift well after the fire had broken out. (The Independent)