Emergency workers struggled with flooded caverns and flammable gas as they searched for Russian miners after a devastating methane blast which killed 107 people.
Stunned relatives filed grimly into a morgue to identify sons and husbands killed in Russia's worst mine disaster in a decade.
Both processes were hindered by the scale of the destruction.
Emergency officials said water, gas and structural damage in the Ulyanovskaya mine was slowing the search for three men still missing, while forensic pathologists said identification was difficult because bodies were badly burned, Russian news agencies reported.
Among those missing and believed dead were the mine's top management, its chief engineer and a British employee of the British-German mining consultancy IMC who were in the mine checking on the operation of a British-made hazard monitoring system.
The blast ripped through the mine in the coal-rich Siberian region known as the Kuzbass on Monday when about 200 workers were underground, sparking a massive rescue operation.
A total of 93 people made it to the surface safely. Bodies of the 107 confirmed dead were also brought to the surface, but only 26 had been identified, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.
AP