The death toll from a methane blast that ripped though a coal mine in southern Poland has risen to 21 after rescue workers found more bodies, a spokesman for the company operating the mine said on Thursday.
"Rescuers first found bodies of three miners in the gallery where the accident happened, then 12 others, taking the toll of the catastrophe to 21," said KW spokesman Zbigniew Madej after a renewed search.
"Two miners are still missing, and operations will continue until rescue workers find them," said Madej.
However, he said, any hope of finding them alive was close to impossible.
Temperatures in the mine hit 1,000-1,500 Celsius during the explosion, creating "conditions which can only be compared with war," Madej added.
Twenty-six miners had been working in the shaft some 1,000 metres (3,300 feet) underground at the Halemba mine in Ruda Slaska when disaster struck on Tuesday afternoon.
Three of the miners were able to make it back to the surface in the aftermath of the explosion and rescue workers recovered six bodies, all too badly charred to be identified, in initial operations late Tuesday and early Wednesday.
But search operations were called off and restarted repeatedly amid fears that high concentrations of methane gas could endanger the rescue workers.
The miners trapped or killed in the blast were carrying out work to permanently close down a shaft which had been damaged in an earlier accident in March.
A previous methane explosion killed 19 miners in 1990 at Halemba, one of around 35 working coal mines in Poland, the EU's biggest coal producer.
The latest catastrophe is the worst in Poland since 1979, when 34 miners died in an explosion at the Dymitrow pit at Bytom, which like Halemba is in the southern coalbelt region of Silesia.