Emergency workers on Sunday found the bodies of the last four miners who had been missing since a fire erupted in a Siberian gold mine last week, the Emergency Situations Ministry said, bringing the death toll in the disaster to 25. Ministry spokesman Natalya Lukash said the toll was final. «Rescuers are now working to bring the bodies of the last four people to the surface,» the ministry's regional chief, Sergei Salov, said in televised comments. The blaze broke out Thursday in the Darasun mine, about 4,700 kilometers (3,000 miles) east of Moscow. Of the 64 people working that shift, 31 made it to the surface within hours of the start of the fire, and a desperate search for the missing began. Eight survivors, their faces streaked with soot, emerged from the smoke-filled tunnels early Saturday, saying they managed to stay alive for two days several hundred meters (yards) underground by sticking together. «Nobody panicked, nobody quarreled,» Yevgeny Slivka, his face covered with soot, told state-run Channel One later Saturday from a hospital bed. The eight were treated for hypothermia and carbon dioxide poisoning.
