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At least 19 miners were killed and one was reported missing late Wednesday after a mine blast in Ukraine, the latest disaster to hit the country only four days after scores were killed in an air show crash, emergencies ministry official Grigory Myronyak told AFP.

An earlier toll had 19 killed and five missing.

As many as 44 rescue teams were sent to the Zasyadko coal mine in the eastern Donetsk region, the head of the mine said.

The cause of the disaster was not immediately known, but another explosion could not be ruled out, emergencies ministry spokesman Dmitry Boguslavsky said.

The blast, which occurred at a depth of 1,076 meters (3,530 feet), capped a series of catastrophes that hit Ukraine in July.

The country was already in shock after a fighter jet crashed at an air show in western Ukraine Saturday, killing 83 people.

Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma declared a national day of mourning Monday.

The crash, the world's most deadly air show disaster on record, killed 83 people, including 23 children. Another 199 onlookers were injured.

The youngest victim was a one-year-old boy, and an entire family -- father, mother and two children -- was also killed in the air show tragedy, according to media.

That disaster shed new light on the sorry state of the country's underfunded and demoralized armed forces.

Kuchma's administration immediately held the military responsible, arresting the air force chief and three other senior air force officials.

The president also sacked the armed forces chief, while the defence minister offered to resign, and the Ukrainian prosecutor accused top military officials and the two pilots of the fighter jet of criminal negligence.

Wednesday's mining disaster was the third in a month for Ukraine's's dilapidated coal-mining industry.

Six miners were killed and 18 injured in a mine blast in the southeastern Dniepropetrovsk region on July 26.

And last Friday Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Dubina announced that 12 officials at a mine in Ukrainsk in the Donetsk region, where 35 people were killed in a fire earlier this month, had been sacked for violating safety rules.

The Zasyadko mine, one of Ukraine's largest with 10,000 employees, was hit by two previous disasters in 1999 and 2001, which killed a total of 105 miners.

Some 160 Ukrainian miners are estimated to have died in incidents this year.

Some 600,000 people work in the former Soviet republic of Ukraine's 200 mines, most of them located in the country's eastern Donbass region.

Most Ukrainian miners earn no more than 100 dollars (euros) per month and the government owes them some 350 million dollars (358 million euros) in back pay and pensions, an official with the miners' union said.

Ukraine has launched a restructuring program with the World Bank, which should see half of the countries mines closed down over the next five years.

Ukrainian coal is generally considered as being of fairly poor quality and its extraction costs are often higher than the price at which it is sold.

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