With just three miners unaccounted for, Xinhua news agency said the number of miners confirmed dead from the Sunday night cave-in at the state-run Dongfeng coal mine in the northeast province of Heilongjiang was 148.

The central government's safety watchdog, the State Administration for Work Safety, had a lower death toll on Tuesday evening of 140.

However it said there were 11 miners still missing underground, meaning the final tally could be 151.

Another 72 miners had been rescued, the watchdog and Xinhua said.

As rescue efforts continued for those still missing, the victims' relatives expressed anger and frustration at the Dongfeng mine's management for consistently ignoring safety concerns and exploiting the workers.

"They all knew there were safety problems but they wouldn't do anything about it," a woman surnamed Ge, who was waiting outside the mine on Monday night to hear news of two of her relatives, told AFP.

Ge said miners had in the past threatened to strike unless the poor safety standards were improved but the management had rejected their demands.

At the local hospital, a woman surnamed Song said Tuesday that the management had taken advantage of the desperation of the impoverished people in the area.

"It's all because they needed the money," she said of the workers who went down the pit despite the dangers as she sat by her 18-year-old nephew who was hauled out of the mine alive.

Qitaihe city, where the mine is located, is a bleak coal mining area with virtually no other industry. It is less than 200 kilometres (125 miles) from Siberia.

"It's the officials who should have died, not the people who went down the shaft," Song said, adding workers received between 400 and 1,000 yuan (49 and 123 dollars) a month for their labours.

The wife of Ning Wenzhou, a miner who perished in the disaster, also said management ignored safety warnings in the days leading up to the explosion.

"I heard that around the 20th (November) the gas was already above safe levels and the alarm was going off but no one did anything about it," Wu Fenghua said.

State-run mining conglomerate Heilongjiang Longmei Group, one of the biggest coal producers in China with an output of 27 million tonnes of coal in the first half of this year, owns the Dongfeng mine.

The mine, which was built in 1956, has an annual capacity of 500,000 tonnes and was one of the smaller ones in the Longmei group, officials with the company have said.

The government's national work safety watchdog said Monday the mine was fully licensed.

The Qimei group, a company under the Longmei group, said Tuesday it would pay compensation of around 200,000 yuan to the relatives of each dead miner.

The Dongfeng disaster has once again thrown the spotlight on China's notorious coal mining industry, which is regarded as the most dangerous in the world.

Just over 6,000 people died in China's coal mines last year, according to government figures. State press said the figure represented 80 percent of global fatalities in the industry.

Independent critics, including the Hong Kong-based China Labor Bulletin, say the number of coal mining deaths in China each year could be as high as

The crisis has worsened in recent years as demand for coal has escalated to help fuel the nation's breakneck economic growth.

China relies on coal for two-thirds of its energy needs and the government said early this month it intended to increase domestic coal production from 2.1 billion tons to 2.4 billion tons over the next five years.

The Dongfeng mine explosion is the third reported coal mine disaster this year to have claimed more than 100 lives.

On February 14, 214 miners were killed in a gas explosion at a coal mine in the northeast province of Liaoning, while the flooding of an illegal coal mine in the southern province of Guangdong killed 123.

There have been four other reported coal mine disasters over the past decade to have killed more than 100 people.

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