World

BELGRADE — Bosnia said Monday it was witnessing “the biggest exodus” since the 1990s war after the worst floods in a century inundated huge swathes of the Balkans, killing at least 47 people.

Muddy waters from the Sava River have submerged houses, churches, mosques and roads in Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia after record rainfall last week wreaked havoc across the region.

There were fears that dead bodies and animal carcasses could lead to disease outbreaks, while officials warned that 120,000 unexploded mines from the conflicts of the 1990s could be dislodged.

“More than 100,000 people” have been evacuated from Bosnia alone, said Stanko Sliskovic of Bosnia’s emergency services, with tens of thousands more displaced in neighbouring countries.

“This is the biggest exodus since the end of the 1992-1995 war,” he told AFP.

Dozens of towns and villages have been cut off, and over 2,000 landslides already reported, with water levels expected to continue rising in the coming days.

“This is Armageddon, I can’t describe it otherwise,” Nedeljko Brankovic told AFP from Krupanj, a town in the southwestern town of Serbia. “Houses are literally washed away and landslides are everywhere.”

Bosnian Foreign Minister Zlatko Lagumdzija said more than a quarter of the country’s population of 3.8 million “has been affected by the floods” after the heaviest rainfalls on record began last week.

“Right now, more than one million people have no water,” he said.

In Serbia, some 600,000 of its 7.2 million inhabitants were affected with “severe floods following the heaviest rains the Balkans have witnessed in 120 years”, the UN’s World Food Programme said in a statement.

“The damage caused by these floods is comparable to the damage caused during the war,” it said.

The death toll from the floods rose to 47 Monday after two new victims were found overnight in a village near the western Serbian town of Sabac.

Neighbouring Croatia has also evacuated hundreds of people from along the river Sava.

 ‘I’ve lost everything again’ 

Rescuers told of wrenching scenes as they finally reached cut-off villages, with dozens of people huddling on top of the tallest houses with no water or food.

“It was like a tsunami,” said Suad Garanovic, resident of the Bosnian village of Topcic Polje, as he looked over his house, now drowned in mud.

“This is the second time I’ve fled my house. The first time was during the war. Now, just like then, I’ve lost everything,” said Nihad Smajlovic in a nearby hamlet.

Svetlana Obojcic described her rescue along with neighbours from the top floor of her building in the Serbian town of Obrenovac.

“All 30 of us were in one flat for three days without electricity,” said the mother-of-two, hugging her six-year old twins in a temporary shelter in the Belgrade suburb of Sumice.

“We ate what we had, we did not have enough water, but at least we are dry now,” she said.

More than 8,000 people, a third of Obrenovac’s population, had already been evacuated since Friday and Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic ordered on Monday that the rest of the town join them. Helicopter footage showed most of the city’s buildings submerged.

Emergency teams were desperately trying to strengthen defences at the nearby Nikola Tesla power plant, which produces around half of Serbia’s electricity and is currently only protected by temporary dikes built by thousands of volunteers along the swollen Sava River.

“I am devastated. I have left everything, my cattle, my pigs, my chickens. Thank God my wife, children and grandchildren are safe,” said 78-year old pensioner Veselin Rankovic from Zabrezje, a nearby village.

In Belgrade, thousands of volunteers were packing and lifting sandbags on the riverfronts of the Sava to secure the capital’s lower areas from flooding expected in the coming days.

Threat of disease, mines 

In a potentially deadly side-effect, officials in Bosnia warned on Monday that some 120,000 unexploded mines left over from the Balkan war of the 1990s could be dislodged and moved.

“Water and landslides have possibly moved some mines, and taken away mine warning signs,” Sasa Obradovic, an official of Bosnia’s Mine Action Centre told AFP.

He warned residents to be “extremely cautious when they start cleaning their houses, land or gardens as the remaining mud could hide mines and other explosive devices brought by rivers”.

Health authorities have warned of possible outbreaks of infectuous diseases such as enterocolitis, typhoid and hepatitis as temperatures rise.

“We have to react properly to avoid an even worse catastrophe, to avoid infectuous diseases,” Serbian Health Minister Zlatibor Loncar told state TV RTS.

The United Nations flew life-saving equipment to Serbia overnight, with another plane with emergency food and water supplies was expected later Monday.

SOMA, Turkey — Turkish police on Sunday detained 24 people, including mining executives, suspected of negligence over the disaster that killed 301 people, and sparked fury at the government and officials, local media reported.

Rescue operations ended on Saturday after the bodies of the last two trapped miners were retrieved following the country’s worst ever industrial disaster in the western town of Soma.

Dozens of prosecutors have been assigned to investigate the fire and explosion believed to have been sparked by an electrical fault at a private mine.

Among those detained is Akin Celik, general director of mine operator Soma Komur, NTV television reported. The suspects could face charges including manslaughter, it added.

Soma Komur has vehemently denied any negligence.

“We have all worked very hard. I have not seen such an incident in 20 years,” Celik said on Friday.

The labour ministry also denied culpability, saying the mine had been inspected every six months.

A preliminary expert report on the accident obtained by the Milliyet newspaper pointed to several safety violations in the mine, including a shortage of carbon monoxide detectors and ceilings made of wood instead of metal.

The authenticity of the report could not be immediately verified.

A group of rescue workers told NTV that a cave-in had occurred in the mine after the ceilings burnt down and collapsed due to the fire.

The Soma disaster has sparked a wave of fury against the government, adding to pressure on Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan ahead of his expected run for the presidency in August.

Soma was in a virtual lockdown on Sunday after checkpoints were set up on the main roads leading to the town where all demonstrations were banned, AFP reporters on the scene said.

Only inspectors and security forces were allowed at the site of the disaster after the rescue teams had left.

On Saturday, at least 36 people, including eight lawyers, were arrested and held in a stadium in Soma after they attempted to make a statement. Some of the lawyers were beaten and injured by police.

Images of police firing tear gas and water cannon at thousands of protesters in Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir have also revived memories of the government’s heavy-handed crackdown against nationwide protests in 2013.

A total of 787 people were inside the mine when the blast hit, Energy Minister Taner Yildiz said. Most of the victims died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

“I was very sad when I came here and I am still very sad,” Yildiz told reporters before leaving Soma on Sunday, pledging support for the stricken families.

The disaster has added to the huge political pressure on Erdogan, whose Islamic-rooted party emerged triumphant from March 30 local elections despite a corruption scandal implicating key allies and last year’s mass protests.

KOSTOLAC, Serbia/DOBOJ, Bosnia — Soldiers, police and villagers battled to protect power plants in Serbia from rising flood waters on Sunday as the death toll from the Balkan region’s worst rainfall in more than a century reached 37.

Twelve bodies were recovered from the worst-hit Serbian town of Obrenovac, 30km southwest of the capital, Belgrade, but the number was likely to rise as waters receded.

“The situation is catastrophic,” Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic told reporters.

Hundreds of soldiers and residents scrambled to raise sandbag barriers around the perimeter of the Kostolac power plant east of Belgrade, where a Reuters cameraman said waters from the swollen River Mlava, a tributary to the much larger River Danube, had come to within a kilometre.

Workers at the plant joined the effort, digging up a road in a bid to divert waters that threatened to flood nearby coal mines. The Kostolac plant supplies 20 per cent of Serbia’s electricity needs.

Russian cargo planes carrying boats, generators and food joined rescue teams from around Europe, and thousands of local volunteers in evacuating people and building flood defences after the River Sava, swollen by days of torrential rain, burst its banks.

Rains eased and floodwaters receded on Sunday in some of the worst-hit areas of Serbia and Bosnia, but the Sava was forecast to rise further. Thousands of people have been displaced.

Serbia’s EPS power utility said a fresh flood wave also threatened Serbia’s largest power plant, the Nikola Tesla in Obrenovac.

Flooding had already cut Serbian power generation by 40 per cent, forcing the cash-strapped country to boost imports.

“More and more water is getting closer but for the time being the sandbag defence barriers are holding,” Tanjug news agency quoted Kostolac general manager Dragan Jovanovic as saying.

‘Tsunami’

The economic impact of the floods is likely to be huge, devastating the agricultural sector vital to both the Serbian and Bosnian economies.

Vucic said a fire and flooding of surface mines on Friday at the Kolubara coal-fired power plant southwest of Belgrade had caused damage of at least 100 million euros ($137 million).

“These are the kind of waters not seen in 1,000 years, let alone 100,” Vucic told a televised Cabinet session.

He said 12 bodies had been recovered from Obrenovac after waters dropped from a peak of some three metres. At least five more were reported dead elsewhere in Serbia.

In Bosnia, 19 people were confirmed dead, with nine bodies recovered from the northeastern town of Doboj after what the regional police chief described as a “tsunami” of water.

A Reuters cameraman at the scene said half the town was still submerged. Soldiers delivered food and medical supplies by truck, boat and bulldozer. Cranes lifted medical workers into some homes and removed stranded residents from others.

Zeljka Cvijanovic, prime minister of Bosnia’s autonomous Serb Republic, compared the devastation to Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, in which 100,000 people died. “The damage is such that we cannot recall even after the war,” she told reporters.

In Croatia, the government said one person had died, and two were missing in flooded villages in an eastern corner of the country near Bosnia and Serbia. The army used amphibious vehicles to help evacuate some 3,000 people.

“I carried my kids out on my back, then waited 12 hours to be rescued myself,” said 40-year-old Obrenovac resident Dragan Todorovic, who spent the night in a Belgrade sports hall with dozens of other families. “The house was new, built two years ago for 100,000 euros. What now?”

SAVASTEPE, Turkey — Turkish rescue workers have retrieved the bodies of the last two missing miners in the nation’s worst mining disaster, putting the final death toll at 301, the energy minister said Saturday.

Taner Yildiz said 485 miners escaped or were rescued after Tuesday’s explosion and fire that devastated a coal mine in Soma, western Turkey.

“All corners of the mine were searched by a large team and there was no other body or living person,” he said. “Until today we had focused on search and rescue efforts. Now we will be focusing on investigations, on what will happen about production.”

“We won’t be leaving [Soma] because the search efforts are ending,” he added. “There will be psychological and social support.”

Government and mining officials have insisted that the disaster was not due to negligence and that the mine was inspected regularly. Akin Celik, the mine’s operations manager, has said thick smoke from the underground fire killed many miners who had no gas masks. High levels of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide have been a problem for rescue workers as well.

But one miner, 24-year-old Erdal Bicak, told The Associated Press that he believes the disaster was due to the mining company’s negligence.

“The company is guilty,” Bicak said. He said managers had machines that measure methane gas levels: “The new gas levels had gotten too high and they didn’t tell us in time.”

Yildiz said it is too early to say why the explosion occurred.

BUENOS AIRES — Paleontologists in Argentina’s remote Patagonia region have discovered fossils of what was likely the largest dinosaur ever to roam the earth.

The creature is believed to be a new species of Titanosaur, a long-necked, long-tailed sauropod that walked on four legs and lived some 95 million years ago in the Cretaceous Period.

The dinosaur “weighed the equivalent of more than 14 African elephants”, or about 100 tonnes, said Jose Luis Carballido, a paleontologist at the Egidio Feruglio Museum in the southern Argentine city of Trelew.

“This is a true paleontological treasure,” Carballido said in a statement on Friday on the museum website.

“There are many remains and they were practically intact, something that does not frequently happen.”

Known fossils “of a giant Titanosaur are scarce and fragmentary”.

Museum director Ruben Cuneo told local media that the remains belong to “the largest known specimen” of its kind and “the most complete find of this type of dinosaur in the world”.

The fossils were accidently discovered in 2011 by a farm worker in a remote area in the Patagonian province of Chubut, some 1,300 kilometres south of Buenos Aires.

The creature was plant-eating and measured some 40 metres from head to tail, Cuneo said.

Photos posted on the museum website show a fossilised femur larger than the paleontologist pictured next to it.

Experts believe that the remains of seven dinosaurs, as well as the broken teeth of carnivores, are among the 200 fossils found at the Chubut site where the giant femur was found.

SOMA, Turkey — Anger at Turkey’s government boiled over Thursday when thousands went on strike and police clashed with protesters after at least 282 workers died in one of the worst mining accidents in modern history.

As hopes faded for scores more miners still trapped underground two days after the devastating blast, police fired tear gas and water cannon at around 20,000 anti-government protesters in the western city of Izmir.

Turkey’s four biggest unions called a one-day strike, saying workers’ lives were being jeopardised to cut costs and demanding that those responsible for the collapse of the coal mine in the western town of Soma in Manisa province be brought to account.

“Hundreds of our workers have been left to die from the very beginning by being forced to work in cruel production processes to achieve maximum profits,” they said in a joint statement, calling on people to wear black.

Anger at the disaster has swept across Turkey, where mine explosions and cave-ins are a frequent occurrence.

In Izmir, around 100 kilometres south of Soma, the 61-year-old head of one of the main unions Kani Beko was hospitalised after violent clashes with riot police.

In Ankara, police fired tear gas and water cannon on around 200 protesters, a day after thousands clashed with police in the capital and in Istanbul, accusing the government and mining industry of negligence.

President Abdullah Gul said on a visit to the mine Turkey faced “a great disaster”, and vowed action to prevent further such accidents.

“Whatever necessary will be done. We need to review all the regulations, like all developed countries do, so that these accidents do not happen again,” a sorrowful Gul said, with a cracking voice.

Government attitude ‘unacceptable’ 

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has rejected claims of government culpability, saying that “such accidents happen”.

He compared the collapse to 19th-century mining disasters, saying that “204 people died in the UK in 1862 and 361 people in 1864”, in an apparent attempt to downplay its severity.

Erdogan was forced to take refuge in a shop after a furious reaction from relatives of the victims and the missing, some of whom began kicking his vehicle.

Photographs of his advisor kicking a protester in Soma sparked outrage on social media.

It is unclear how many workers are still trapped underground following the huge explosion on Tuesday, which was believed to have been set off by an electrical fault.

Mining operators put the figure at 90, but reports from rescue workers on the scene suggest the figure could be far higher. Most of the victims died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Kemal Ozkan, assistant general secretary of the international trade union federation IndustriALL Global Union, said the “staggering” number of fatalities made the mining disaster the worst in recent memory.

“Turkey has possibly the worst safety record in terms of mining accidents and explosions in Europe, and the third worst in the world,” he told AFP in an e-mailed statement.

“This recent tragedy must rank as the worst mining tragedy in recent memory, and is made all the more tragic by the seemingly uncaring attitude of the government and mining companies.”

The disaster has added to the huge political pressure on Erdogan, who faced mass protests last summer, and a corruption scandal involving his family and key allies in recent months.

“If the claims of negligence at the mine prove true, it will have a political price,” Professor Ilter Turan of Istanbul’s Bilgi University told AFP.

Intensifying the pressure on Erdogan, local media reported that the general manager of the mine operator Soma Komur, Ramazan Dogru, was married to a member of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

Sinan Ulgen, head of the Istanbul Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies, warned the government would struggle to contain the fallout from the disaster.

“Is this an act of God, or a case of negligence? We don’t know. The government must demonstrate the political will to comply with EU standards on work health and work safety in order for this catastrophe not to become a political minefield,” he told AFP.

Death announcements 

Authorities said 282 people were confirmed dead making it Turkey’s worst ever industrial accident.

Before midday prayers on Thursday, thousands of locals packed the cemetery in Soma where grave-diggers were still hollowing out a long line of graves.

All morning the loudspeakers in the town of 100,000 had been crackling with the sound of death announcements — the names of the deceased, and details of their burial arrangements.

“My husband works in another mine,” said Fethiye Kudu, watching the solemn graveside procession under the beating sun and wind. “I came out of solidarity. It’s very hard for us all.”

Early reports said 787 workers were underground when the blast occurred. By late Wednesday, “close to 450” workers had been rescued, according to Soma Komur.

But accounts from rescue workers cast doubt over these numbers.

Erdem Bakin, a doctor with the Search and Rescue organisation, said only around 70 to 80 people who were between the mine entrance and the transformer that exploded had survived.

The prosecutor’s office in Soma, a key centre for lignite coal mining located around 480 kilometres southwest of Istanbul, has launched an investigation into the disaster.

The main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) said it asked parliament last month to investigate work-related accidents at coal mines in Soma, but the government turned down the request.

“We receive tip-offs every day that workers’ lives are under threat,” local CHP lawmaker Ozgur Ozel told Turkish media.

“We lawmakers from Manisa are tired of going to miner funerals.”

Turkey’s ministry of labour and social security said the Soma mine had been inspected eight times in the last four years, most recently on March 17, and was found to comply with safety regulations.

Soma Komur said it had taken maximum measures to ensure safety.

GAJARIA, Bangladesh — A heavily laden ferry capsized and sank in central Bangladesh on Thursday after being caught in a storm, leaving at least 12 people dead and hundreds more missing, police and officials said.

Survivors of what is the latest in a string of ferry disasters to blight Bangladesh said the vessel began to sway when the storm hit, finally tipping over and sinking in minutes, giving passengers little time to leap to safety.

The exact number of passengers was not immediately known. It is common for ferries to carry many more than their official limit.

“We are receiving confusing figures on how many passengers were on board when it sank, but the number could range from 200 to 350,” said district government administrator Saiful Hasan, who is coordinating the rescue effort.

“The toll now stands at 12,” he said of the accident on the river Meghna in Munshiganj district, some 50 kilometres south of the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka.

Local police chief Ferdous Ahmed also confirmed the recovery of the bodies, which included at least two women and one child.

The double-decker vessel was travelling to the southern district of Shariatpur from Dhaka when it encountered problems and sank in the mid-afternoon, according to the police.

“Around 20-30 people managed to swim to safety when the boat went down,” Ahmed told AFP.

Rescue coordinator Hasan told AFP that a navy ship, a salvage vessel and about a dozen speedboats had reached the spot. Fire service divers had located the sunken ferry and were attempting to recover bodies as darkness fell.

The width of the river, the depth of the water and the strong currents were hampering rescuers’ efforts to retrieve the wreckage, Hasan said.

Hundreds of distraught relatives gathered on the banks of the river as the bodies were laid in lines in order to be identified.

Others accompanied rescuers on boats as they searched for the missing passengers.

25-year-old Sumon, who only uses one name, said his uncle and teenage cousin were both missing.

“They were travelling home from Dhaka to our village,” Sumon told AFP.

The local online newspaper Banglanews24.com quoted a survivor of the accident, Abdur Razzaq, as saying that the boat was hit by the storm suddenly and sank in a matter of minutes.

Fire service officer Nurul Alam, who was taking part in the rescue effort, told AFP: “I fear there are many more bodies trapped inside the vessel.”

History of disaster

Ferry accidents are common in Bangladesh, one of Asia’s poorest nations which is criss-crossed with more than 230 rivers.

Experts blame poorly maintained vessels, flaws in design and overcrowding for most of the tragedies.

Storms known locally as Kalboishakhi often hit Bangladesh during the early summer months in the lead-up to the monsoon, which generally begins in the first week of June.

Boats are the main form of travel in much of Bangladesh’s remote rural areas, especially in the southern and northeastern regions.

Some 150 people were killed in the same district in March 2012 after a overcrowded ferry carrying about 200 passengers sank after being hit by an oil barge in the dead of night.

In 2011, 32 people were killed after a passenger vessel sank in the same river in the same district after colliding with a cargo ship.

At least 85 people drowned in 2009 when an overloaded triple-decker ferry capsized off Bhola Island in the country’s south.

Naval officials have said more than 95 per cent of Bangladesh’s hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized boats do not meet minimum safety regulations.

KIEV — Ukraine’s government launched talks Wednesday on decentralising power as part of a European-backed peace plan but didn’t invite its main foes, the pro-Russia insurgents who have declared independence in the east.

That deliberate oversight left it unclear whether the negotiations might help cool the tensions in the east.

In his opening remarks, acting President Oleksandr Turchynov said authorities were “ready for a dialogue” but insisted they will not talk to the pro-Russia gunmen who have seized buildings and fought government troops across eastern Ukraine.

“Let’s have a dialogue, let’s discuss specific proposals,” Turchynov said, “But those armed people who are trying to wage a war on their own country, those who are with arms in their hands trying to dictate their will, or rather the will of another country, we will use legal procedures against them and they will face justice.”

Insurgents in the east shrugged off the round-table talks as meaningless.

“We haven’t received any offers to join a round table and dialogue,” Denis Pushilin, an insurgent leader in Donetsk. “If the authorities in Kiev want a dialogue, they must come here. If we go to Kiev, they will arrest us.”

Asked if they would be willing to take part in discussions if the round table was held in the east, Pushilin told The Associated Press that “talks with Kiev authorities could only be about one thing: the recognition of the Donetsk People’s Republic”.

Turchynov chaired the first in a series of round tables with spiritual leaders, lawmakers, government figures and regional officials as part of a peace plan crafted by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a security group that also includes Russia and the United States.

Ukraine right now is deeply divided between those in the west, who want closer ties with Europe, and those in the east, who have strong traditional and language ties with Russia.

Acting Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told participants they will be holding discussions across the country “in as many regions as possible”, but didn’t name any specific one.

Oleksandr Efremov, leader of the Party of Regions in the Ukrainian parliament, the support base of ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, voiced hope that the discussions will be held in the east “where things are perceived in a different way”.

Efremov called on the government to withdraw its troops from the Donetsk region and urged authorities to understand that people are genuinely suspicious of the new government that came to power after Yanukovych fled to Russia in February.

The Ukrainian government, however, has said it will not stop its offensive to retake eastern cities now under the control of the separatists who declared independence Monday in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, home to 6.6 million people.

Kiev-appointed Donetsk governor Serhiy Taruta sought to strike a reconciliatory note, urging the government among other things to refrain from calling pro-Russia protesters “terrorists” and to dismantle the protest camp on Kiev’s Maidan square that led to Yanukovych’s departure.

That would send a message that Kiev treats all protesters from the east and west equally, Taruta said.

The OSCE road map aims to halt fighting between government forces and pro-Russia separatists in the east, and de-escalate tensions ahead of Ukraine’s May 25 presidential vote. It calls on all sides to refrain from violence, offers an amnesty for those involved in the unrest, and urges talks on decentralisation and the status of the Russian language.

Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Yevhen Perebiynis lamented, however, that the OSCE plan does not specifically oblige Russia to do anything.

Even so, European officials applauded the start of the talks. The EU’s enlargement commissioner, Stefan Fule, welcomed the round table on his Twitter account, voicing hope the next meeting would take place in eastern Ukraine.

But that wouldn’t be enough for many of the insurgents.

“The government in Kiev does not want to listen to the people of Donetsk,” said Denis Patkovski, a pro-Russia militiaman in the eastern city of Slovyansk. “They just come here with their guns.”

Russia has strongly backed the OSCE road map while the United States, which says it’s worth a try, views its prospects for success with skepticism. Sawsan Chebli, a spokeswoman for German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said Ukraine’s acceptance of the round-table format was a step in the right direction, whether the pro-Russia separatists were invited or not.

The OSCE itself would not comment on the talks.

Ukraine and the West have accused Moscow of fomenting the unrest in eastern Ukraine, where insurgents declared independence for the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Dozens have died in the scattershot fighting across the east. On Tuesday, the defence ministry said six soldiers were killed and nine wounded in a rebel ambush near the city of Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region — the deadliest attack on the Ukrainian military since the offensive began last month.

Defence ministry spokesman Bohdan Senyk said about 30 gunmen lined both sides of a road and used rocket-propelled grenades to knock out military vehicles in a battle that raged for an hour. On Wednesday morning, AP journalists saw the charred carcasses of a Ukrainian armored personnel carrier and a truck at the clash site.

Defence Minister Mykhailo Koval claimed that the insurgents were being aided by Russian servicemen.

“Russia has waged an undeclared new-generation war in Ukraine. The neighboring country has unleashed a war using units of terrorists and saboteurs,” he said.

Russia has vehemently denied involvement.

In Donetsk, about 15 men with automatic weapons arrived at a military base Wednesday morning and demanded that the soldiers pledge allegiance to the self-proclaimed rebel Donetsk People’s Republic, said Viktoria Kushnir, a spokeswoman for Ukraine’s National Guard. The men blocked the base’s gate with a truck but the servicemen eventually persuaded them to go, Kushnir said.

In Moscow, Sergei Naryshkin, speaker of the lower house of the Russian parliament, said Wednesday that the Ukrainian authorities’ refusal to speak to their foes and the continuing military operation in the east will undermine the legitimacy of Ukraine’s May 25 presidential vote.

But in an important change, he added that the failure to hold it would be even worse.

“It’s hard to imagine that this election could be fully legitimate,” Naryshkin said on Rossiya 24 television. “But it’s obvious that the failure to hold the election would lead to an even sadder situation, so it’s necessary to choose the lesser evil.”

Moscow had previously called for postponing Ukraine’s presidential vote, saying it must be preceded by a constitutional reform that would turn Ukraine into a federation. It has recently taken a more conciliatory stance, apparently seeking to ease what has become the worst crisis in relations with the West since the Cold War.

The interim government had hoped that Ukraine would unite behind the new presidential election but insurgents in Luhansk and Donetsk have already said they won’t allow the presidential ballot to be held.

SOMA, Turkey — Hopes faded of finding more survivors in a coal mine in western Turkey on Wednesday, where 238 workers were confirmed killed and 120 more still feared to be trapped in what is likely to prove the nation’s worst ever industrial disaster.

Anger over the deadly fire at the mine about 480km southwest of Istanbul echoed across a country that has seen a decade of rapid economic growth but still suffers from one of the world’s worst workplace safety records. Opponents blamed Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s government for ignoring repeated warnings about the safety of the country’s mines.

“We as a nation of 77 million are experiencing a very great pain,” Erdogan told a news conference after visiting the site, at which he gave the figures for those confirmed dead and still thought missing. But he appeared to turn defensive when asked whether sufficient precautions had been in place at the mine.

“Explosions like this in these mines happen all the time. It’s not like these don’t happen elsewhere in the world,” he said, reeling off a list of global mining accidents since 1862.

Fire knocked out power, and shut down ventilation shafts and elevators shortly after 3pm (1200 GMT) on Tuesday. After an all-night rescue effort, emergency workers pumped oxygen into the mine to try to keep those trapped alive. Thousands of family members and co-workers gathered outside the town’s hospital searching for information on their loved ones.

“We haven’t heard anything from any of them, not among the injured, not among the list of dead,” said one elderly woman, Sengul, whose two nephews worked in the mine along with the sons of two of her neighbours.

“It’s what people do here, risking their lives for two cents... They say one gallery in the mine has not been reached, but it’s almost been a day,” she said.

The fire broke out during a shift change, leading to uncertainty over the exact number of miners trapped. Energy Minister Taner Yildiz said late on Tuesday 787 workers were in the mine at the time.

Initial reports suggested an electrical fault caused the blaze but Mehmet Torun, a board member and former head of the Chamber of Mining Engineers who was at the scene, said a disused coal seam had heated up, expelling carbon monoxide through the mine’s tunnels and galleries.

“They are ventilating the shafts but carbon monoxide kills in three or five minutes,” he told Reuters by telephone.

“Unless we have a major miracle, we shouldn’t expect anyone to emerge alive at this point,” he said, pointing to an outside chance that workers may have found air pockets to survive.

Deadliest ever

The disaster highlighted Turkey’s poor record on worker safety and drew renewed opposition calls for an inquiry into a drop in safety standards at previously state-run mines. The International Labour Organisation ranked the EU candidate nation third worst in the world for worker deaths in 2012.

Erdogan earlier declared three days of national mourning and cancelled an official visit to Albania. President Abdullah Gul also cancelled a trip to China scheduled for Thursday in order to travel to Soma.

“We are heading towards this accident likely being the deadliest ever in Turkey,” Yildiz told reporters, adding that “hopes were dimming” of finding many more survivors.

A pall of smoke hung above the area and Yildiz said the fire was still burning underground, hampering the rescue operation.

Some 93 people were rescued, including several rescuers who had themselves become trapped or overcome by fumes and 85 were being treated for their injuries, Turkey’s disaster management agency AFAD said in an e-mail.

Protests

Freezer trucks and a cold storage warehouse usually used for food served as makeshift morgues as hospital facilities overflowed. Medical staff intermittently emerged from the hospital to read the names of survivors being treated inside, with families and fellow workers clamouring for information.

“This isn’t a huge city. Everyone has neighbours, relatives or friends injured, dead or still trapped. I am trying to prepare my family for the worst,” said Hasan Dogan, 27, watching TV news reports from a canteen set up outside the hospital.

Some 16,000 people from a population of 105,000 in the district of Soma work in the mining industry, according to Erkan Akcay, a local opposition politician. The district is no stranger to tragedies, but never before on this scale.

The words “For those who give a life for a handful of coal” are engraved on the entrance wall to the emergency clinic.

Teams of psychiatrists were being pulled together to help counsel the families of victims. Paramilitary police guarded the entrance to the mine to keep distressed relatives at a safe distance, as residents offered soup, water and bread.

“They haven’t brought any ambulances in such a long time that we’ve started to lose hope,” said Hatice Ersoy, 43, a woman in a headscarf sitting on a pavement outside the hospital.

Several hundred people chanted “Government: resign!” at Soma’s local government building as Erdogan visited the town.

Around 200 people briefly protested in front of the Istanbul headquarters of Soma Komur Isletmeleri, the operator of the mine. The company said in a brief statement late on Tuesday that there had been “a grave accident” caused by an explosion in a substation but gave few other details.

Police fired tear gas and water cannon on student protesters at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara who wanted to march on the energy ministry.

At Istanbul’s Taksim Square, two left-wing opposition newspaper vendors read out headlines to silent morning commuters. “Turkey is a graveyard for workers,” and “This wasn’t an accident, this was negligence.”

Poor record

Turkey’s rapid growth over the past decade has seen a construction boom and a scramble to meet soaring energy demand, with worker safety standards often failing to keep pace. It is a net importer of coal.

Its safety record in coal mining has been poor for decades, with its deadliest accident to date in 1992, when a gas blast killed 263 workers in the Black Sea province of Zonguldak.

The labour ministry said late on Tuesday its officials had carried out regular inspections at the Soma mine, most recently in March and that no irregularities had been detected.

But Hursit Gunes, a deputy from the main opposition Republican People’s Party, said a previous request for a parliamentary inquiry into safety and working conditions at mines around Soma had been rejected by the ruling AK Party.

“I’m going to renew that parliamentary investigation demand today. If [the government] has been warned about this and they did nothing, then people will be angry, naturally. The opposition warned them. But there’s unbelievable lethargy on this issue,” Gunes told Reuters.

The ILO in 2012 said Turkey had the highest rate of worker deaths in Europe and the world’s third-highest. In the mining sector, 61 people died in 2012, according to the ILO’s latest statistics. Between 2002 and 2012, the death toll at Turkish mines totalled more than 1,000.

LONDON — The spread of a puzzling respiratory virus in the Middle East and beyond is not a global health emergency despite a recent spike in cases, the World Health Organisation said Wednesday.

The decision was made after a meeting of WHO's expert group on the Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS.

Since 2012, MERS has sickened more than 500 people and killed 145, mostly in the Middle East. The majority of cases have been in Saudi Arabia, although the disease has spread within the region and to Asia, North Africa, Europe and the United States.

MERS often starts with flu-like symptoms but can lead to pneumonia, breathing problems and in severe cases, kidney failure and death.

"Calling a global emergency in a world which has a lot of issues is a major act," said Dr. Keiji Fukuda, an assistant director-general of WHO, told reporters Wednesday. "You have to have really solid evidence to say this is a global emergency."

Fukuda said there wasn't yet proof of the virus' sustained transmission among people.

Last week, however, WHO did declare the world's widening polio outbreaks to be an international health emergency.

Some scientists said while MERS technically meets the criteria for a global health emergency, declaring it as such could confuse the public.

"People might think (WHO) is crying wolf because MERS is still primarily a problem in the Middle East," said Michael Osterholm, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Minnesota who has worked in the Middle East. "But if one of those infected people gets on a plane and lands in London, Toronto, New York or Hong Kong and transmits to another 30 people, everyone will have a different view."

Some experts say the spread of MERS is worryingly similar to the 2003 global outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome or SARS, which infected about 8,000 people in 2003, killing nearly 800. MERS is genetically related to SARS.

Scientists are unsure exactly how people are catching MERS but suspect the disease is linked to camels. WHO recommends that people avoid contact with the animals, skip drinking camel milk or using camel urine in traditional medicines and only eat camel meat that has been well cooked.

Dr. Clemens Wendtner, who treated a German MERS patient in Munich last year, said the current spread of MERS should not set off a global alarm. He was not part of the WHO meeting.

"I do not see an international threat or a pandemic (being caused) by MERS," he wrote in an email. He said the spread of MERS to humans was still exceptional and that the disease was mostly affecting animals.

WHO said its expert committee would reconvene in several weeks to consider any new MERS developments.