Three miners feared dead in India's Assam state, six others trapped

Three miners are feared dead in a flooded coal mine in a remote district of India's northeastern Assam state, authorities said on Tuesday. The men are among nine still trapped as rescue teams worked to reach them.

The mine, in an area controlled by the state government, appeared to be illegal, Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said on social media platform X, adding that police had arrested one person in connection with the case.

Rescuers have spotted three bodies but have not yet recovered them, the local government said a day after the nine miners were trapped by heavy flooding police said was probably triggered underground.

“The well is about 45m deep, of which almost 30m is filled with water,” Kaushik Rai, a local minister who is at the site, told Reuters.

“Three teams have attempted to enter it since morning and have managed to go as far as 9.1m to 10.7m.”

Police said the flooding probably took place in the mine.

“They [the miners] probably hit some water channel and water came out and flooded it,” Mayank Kumar, district police chief in Dima Hasao said.

Army teams deployed divers, helicopters and engineers to aid rescue efforts in Assam's hilly Dima Hasao district, the army said.

Rescue teams lowered divers in a container using a pulley into a large shaft that leads to the mine, according to video from news agency ANI, in which Reuters has a minority stake.

Photographs shared by the army on social media showed rescue workers with ropes, cranes and other equipment standing at the edge of a large, vertical mine.

Coal mine-related disasters in the remote northeastern part of India are not uncommon. In one of the biggest incidents, in 2019, at least 15 miners were buried while working in an illegal mine in the neighbouring state of Meghalaya after it was flooded by water from a nearby river.