The Thursday edition of a Siberian communist newspaper describing the Raspadskaya mine tragedy was confiscated by police to investigate possible extremist remarks, the director of a Tomsk city publishing house said on Thursday.
"Today, a car from our publishing house carrying the entire [Thursday issue] of 25,000 copies of Soviet Kuzbass newspaper was confiscated at a police post four kilometers outside Kemerovo," Lyudmila Kosmynina told RIA Novosti.
Police in Kemerovo said they were unaware of the incident.
A regional communist spokesman said police seized the issue in order to examine the contents of the newspaper for extremist remarks.
He said that the particular issue told the truth about the tragedy at the Raspadskaya coalmine in the west Siberian town of Mezhdurechensk, which was rocked by two powerful blasts on the night of May 8-9 with the loss of dozens of lives.
Rescue work is still under way at the coalmine, where 67 bodies have so far been recovered from the mine, and 23 people are still missing underground.
The accident in Raspadskaya coal mine is thought to have been caused by poor observation of safety regulations. Earlier a special investigations committee ordered criminal charges against the mine's ex-director Igor Volkov for violating safety rules.
The Russian industrial safety watchdog detected over 1,400 safety violations at the mine in 2009 and in January-April 2010 and suspended production five times.
TOMSK, May 27 (RIA Novosti)
