Flood traps miners in China

An underground flood trapped 44 miners in northern China, and nine mine managers were detained amid efforts to conceal the scale of the disaster, the Government said yesterday.

Managers of the Xinjing Coal Mine in Shanxi province failed to report the true size of Friday's disaster, saying only five miners were missing, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

A hundred miners escaped and a 200-member rescue team was searching for the missing men.