According to reports by AFP, 26 missing workers could not have survived, and another six, most of them rescuers, had been killed in a new explosion.

The original methane explosion occurred on Thursday, which killed four miners and ripped through the Severnaya mine in Arctic Russia at a depth of 748m.

“According to the expert technical council, 26 [missing] people who were in the mine had no chances of surviving,” a spokeswoman for the mine's operator Vorkutaugol Tatyana Bushkova told AFP.

“The rescue operation has been halted.”

A fresh methane explosion at the mine, in the early hours of Sunday, killed five rescue workers and a miner, said Anton Kovalishin, a spokesman for the emergencies ministry in the Komi region where the mine is located.