QITAIHE, Heilongjiang, Dec. 3 (Xinhuanet) -- Rescuers found the remains of three more miners killed on Nov. 27 in an explosion at the Dongfeng Coal Mine in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, bringing the death toll to 169 as of 9 a.m. Saturday.

    The killed include 167 miners working underground and two workers in the ground generator room, sources from the rescue headquarters said.

    Search is still going on for the two missing.

    The blast went off at 9:40 p.m. Sunday at the Dongfeng Coal Mine run by the Qitaihe branch of the Longmei Mining (Group) Co., Ltd.

    The latest figures show that 243 miners were working underground when the blast occurred and only 73 of them have been saved.

    In the meantime, the bodies of 155 dead miners have been identified by their relatives, and 117 were cremated.

    The Heilongjiang provincial government held an emergency videophone conference immediately after the accident, ordering a production safety overhaul toward all the coal mines in the province.

    The overhaul targeted at such problems as the overtime running of mines, poor ventilation systems, bad coal-dust-proof equipment and over gas density underground.

    Vice Governor Liu Haisheng announced Saturday that the provincial government will close down 200 small-sized coal mines with serious hidden dangers against production safety by the end of this year.

    The official said many small coal mines in Heilongjiang, including some run by the state, have more than one above-mentioned problems and are forced to stop production to remove the hidden dangers.

    Zhao Tiechui, head of the State Administration of Coal Mine Safety Supervision, also said on Saturday that China will shut down 4,000 small coal mines annually in the forthcoming three years.

    "We can at most keep 10,000 or so small coal mines," said Zhao, who also promised to drastically reduce the incidence of major accidents with coal mines in two years.

    China now has 24,000 small coal mines with the annual production output ranging from 10,000 tons to 30,000 tons each, which account for 70 percent of the country's coal mines.

    The small coal mines have caused not only grave resource waste, with a low rate of recovery, which is averaged between 10 percent to 15 percent, but also serious pollution and higher incidence of accidents, posing a long-standing problem endangering safety at coal mines in the country, according to Zhao.

    Those to be closed will include privately owned coal mines and state owned coal pits, and the methods such as restructuring and mergers will be adopted in the process of closure, said Zhao.

    "The closing of small coal mines won't affect the country's demand for coal," said Zhao, adding the country had approved the establishment of 13 large coal production bases each capable of turning out over 100 million tons of coal annually. Enditem