Kemerovo Region Governor Aman Tuleyev on Saturday blamed the fatal accident at the Raspadskaya coalmine on the owners of the mine.
"Entirely theirs," Tuleyev replied when asked at a news conference how he assessed the liability of the mine's owners for the accident, in which at least 66 people died.
Two explosions hit the Raspadaskaya coalmine near Mezhdurechensk in western Siberia on the night of May 8-9. Search operations were halted on Thursday amid fears of further blasts with 24 people still unaccounted for.
"Under the constitution, under all our laws, the owner is answerable for questions of safety and questions of technology, no matter what happens," Tuleyev said in Mezhdurechensk, where he was taking part in events for a regional day of mourning.
The governor said that scientists involved in the investigation into the accident "do not understand how [a high concentration of methane gas] could accumulate and why the explosion was so powerful."
Tuleyev rejected media reports that miners disabled methane sensors in order to receive higher wages dependent on meeting production targets.
"This is nonsense. You can cover one with cellophane, but there are 1,300, even more," he said.
A spokesman for the Raspadskaya Coal Company, which owns the mine, declined to comment on the governor's statement.
The owners have become the targets of fierce criticism over the accident, and federal investigators denied on Saturday reports that the company's top executives were under house arrest.
"The criminal investigation into the explosion at the Raspadskaya mine continues, but no one, including the leadership of the mine, has had restrictions placed on their movement," said Vladimir Markin, chief spokesman for the Investigations Committee of the Prosecutor General's Office.
MEZHDURECHENSK, May 15 (RIA Novosti)
