Nine workers remain missing deep beneath the ground at Russia’s largest diamond mine, a week after water rushed into an underground shaft.
The flood occurred when more than a hundred miners were working inside the Mir pit in eastern Siberia.
The mine, which is located near the town of Mirny in Yakutia, is owned by the state-run Alrosa diamond company, who said most of the trapped labourers had been returned to the surface.
However, rescue workers and divers are still toiling to get the remaining miners trapped in the shaft to safety.
They have already succeeded in rescuing one worker, who was taken to hospital with a bruised lung.
Flooding of the adjacent open-pit mine, which is no longer operational as mining has moved underground, may have caused the problem, according to local emergency services, as water leaked into one of the active mine’s pumping stations.
