Blast at Mittal's Kazakh mine kills at least 18

ALMATY, Sep 20 (Reuters) At least 18 people were killed and 25 were missing today when an underground explosion tore through a coal mine in Kazakhstan belonging to Mittal Steel.

The death toll looked set to climb. One local government official said that by early evening just three miners had been rescued and were in intensive care.

The Lenin mine, where the blast occurred just before 9:00 am, is one of eight supplying coal to the company's Temirtau factory, one of the world's biggest steel plants and the Central Asian country's largest.

The plant continued to work as normal, a company source said, and the accident would not affect customers.

The head of Mittal Steel in Kazakhstan said only that 43 miners were missing after the explosion at the mine in the central region of Karaganda, 200 km (125 miles) south of the capital, Astana.

In London, the company issued a statement saying 18 people had died and 25 were missing after a methane explosion.

The blast occurred at a depth of 500 metres and 324 miners working underground were able to scramble to safety, local media reports said. The ensuing fire continued to blaze.

Three of the missing miners had been rescued, Zhanara Bekbanova, a spokeswoman for the regional governor, said by telephone from Karaganda.

The Lenin mine, a labyrinth of seven shafts, was commissioned in 1964 and was the scene in November 2002 of a gas explosion in which 13 miners were killed.

Mittal shares were trading up 0.41 per cent at 27.01 euros on the Paris stock exchange as of 1800 hrs after a drop of 0.1 percent when the news first emerged.

The Temirtau steel plant accounts for some four percent of Kazakh gross domestic product and is the nation's single largest corporate employer with its 55,000-strong workforce.

Mittal's Indian-born billionaire owner Lakshmi Mittal paid around 400 million dollars for the steel plant, formerly known as Karmet, in 1995. By 2007 it had planned to have invested around 1.4 billion dollars modernising the site, which pumps around 40 per cent of its production to China.

Temirtau has an annual design capacity of 6 million tonnes of steel, while the plant's coal mining units can extract up to 12 million tonnes of coal annually.

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