Rescue teams continued on Tuesday to search for eight miners, a day after an explosion ripped through a coal mine in southwestern Siberia, killing at least 100 people, officials said. Up to 200 workers were in the Ulyanovskaya mine in Kemerovo region when the methane blast occurred early Monday at a depth of about 270 meters (885 feet), emergency and regional officials said. The death toll from the blast had risen to 102, the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations said, according to the state-run Interfax news agency; 75 people had been rescued earlier. The Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations said it sent a special investigative team to the disaster site. Among the dead was a visiting British businessman, who was touring the mine at the time of the explosion, the state-run Itar-Tass news agency reported. The mine is in the city of Novokuznetsk, about 3,000 kilometers (1,850 miles) east of Moscow. It is in a major Russian industrial region, with some of the world's largest deposits of coal.
