9 miners rescued from collapsed mine in northern Turkey

Nine miners were rescued from a collapsed mine on Tuesday after being trapped inside for several hours, Turkey's state-run news agency said.

The accident occurred just months after 301 miners were killed in the country's worst mining disaster.

The coal mine in Zonguldak, on Turkey's Black Sea coast, collapsed at around 3 a.m. but authorities were not notified for several hours, delaying the rescue operation, Gov. Ali Kaban said.

The miners were brought out of the mine in the afternoon and immediately hospitalized, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

It was not immediately clear what caused the cave-in.

Kaban told Anadolu that the miners had been trapped in an area close to the mine's exit.

In May, a fire inside a coal mine in Soma, western Turkey, killed 301 people. Turkey's worst mining disaster, it exposed poor safety standards and superficial government inspections in the country's mines.