The final death toll of an earth tremor causing rockfalls deep underground in Europe's largest copper mine in southwestern Poland has risen to eight miners.
The tremor hit the Rudna copper mine at 2009 GMT on Tuesday, the mine's operator KGHM said, causing extensive damage, but the mine remained mostly open.
Earlier on Wednesday, KGHM officials said the tremor had killed five miners and that rescuers had been looking for three other trapped elsewhere in the mine. In their latest statement, the officials said the three miners had been .
"The rescuers have found the three miners' bodies next to each other. Thus, the outcome of this tragic tremor is eight casualties," state-run news agency PAP quoted the Rudna mine director Pawel Markowski as saying.
"The rescue operation lasted for 24 hours. We have done everything to save the miners, unfortunately we lost", Markowski added, calling the tremor KGHM's biggest tragedy in the past 55 years.
The epicentre of the tremor was 1,500 metres below the surface, with a magnitude of 3.4, PAP reported.
Sections of tunnels hundreds of metres below the surface were blocked by rocks, preventing access to the missing miners.
Markowski had said earlier that it was the first time in KGHM's history that such a distant tremor had caused such extensive damage.
State-run KGHM said the Rudna mine, in operation since 1974, had 11 shafts reaching a depth of 1,244 metres.
"We are all shocked by the scale of this tragedy, which occurred in a place we had assessed as exposed to a moderate level of risk," KGHM Chief Executive Officer Radoslaw Domagalski-Labedzki told reporters earlier on Wednesday.
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