Chinese police were hunting for two men responsible for a coal mine in northern China where an explosion caused the deaths of 105 people in the country’s second deadliest mining accident this year, the government said today.

A gas blast at a coal mine in northern China killed 20 people, the government said today, shortly after an unrelated mine explosion left 30 dead and 20 missing.

An official once in charge of guarding cultural relics has been sentenced to death in China’s biggest antiquities theft case since the start of communist rule in 1949.