No survivors in mine blast

Rescuers had worked through two nights in a desperate search for the men, most of whom had gone into the pit to retrieve machinery.

"We went looking for our living colleagues, who worked here with us, but from the start our hope of rescuing anyone alive were almost non-existent," rescue team leader Jan Gaura told reporters and families of the dead gathered outside the pit. "With an explosion like this of methane I don't think they had a chance," he said.

President Lech Kaczyński, who visited the mine on Wednesday, said there would be a public inquiry into the cause of the disaster. He said he had indications that some of the miners were not experienced and not sufficiently qualified.

The President is expected to announce three days of national mourning. The spokesman for Polish state coal company Kompania Węglowa, Zbigniew Madej, confirmed the bodies of all 23 men had been found. "Everything suggests they died at the moment of the explosion," he said.

The death toll is the Polish industry's highest since a blast at another mine in the same Silesia region in 1979 killed 34, according to the PAP news agency. The miners were in a shaft more than 1km underground in the Halemba mine, one of the oldest in Poland, when Tuesday's blast occurred.

Poland's state-run mining industry has suffered more than 150 deaths over the last 30 years, PAP said. The Halemba mine, in the town of Ruda Śląska which is about 300km southwest of Warsaw, has been in operation since 1957.

It is at the heart of Silesia's industrial belt that has been the scene of several disasters. In 1990, 19 miners were killed in the same pit by a gas explosion.(Reuters)