Officials have abandoned efforts to retrieve the bodies of 172 coal miners from a flooded mine in eastern China, family members said Saturday. A government committee notified some families that more than 40 days after the accident, flood waters remain high in the Huayuan Mining Co. mine and it is still too dangerous to enter. «Due to these above mentioned reasons, there is no way to retrieve the bodies of the accident's victims,» the Emergency Rescue Aftermath Working Group, an interagency committee dealing with the accident, said in the notice, dated Thursday. A copy was shown to The Associated Press. The announcement added a bitter note for the relatives in what was already one of the worst mining accidents in 58 years of Communist rule. In addition to the 172 Huayuan miners, nine other miners in a smaller nearby mine were also caught in the flooding Aug. 17 when heavy rains caused a river to breach a dike and inundate low-lying ground outside Xintai city, 600 kilometers (370 miles) south of Beijing.
