MOSCOW - Rescue workers raced to save 59 people trapped inside Russia's largest coal mine on Monday as the death toll from twin underground explosions rose to 31.

The death toll at the Raspadskaya coal mine, 3,000 km east of Moscow, rose from 12 overnight as more bodies were found following two methane explosions on Saturday, the Emergency Ministry said in a statement.

Aman Tuleyev, governor of Kemerovo region where the mine is located, said time was now running out to rescue those trapped in areas of the mine where anti-flooding systems had failed.

"God willing, they are still alive," he said in remarks shown on Russian television. "That possibility still exists, but ... we only have 48 hours until it floods."

The death toll makes the disaster the deadliest in a Russian mine since May 2007, when 39 died as a result of a methane explosion at Yubileynaya mine, also located in Kemerovo.

More than 350 miners were underground when the first explosion rocked the Raspadskaya mine just before midnight on Saturday. Nearly 300 miners managed to escape.

"We felt the wave: dust, gas and hot air," one unnamed miner told Russia's Ekho Moskvy radio station. "We were blocked from both sides but we got out through the emergency exit."

Dozens of relatives gathered in a building nearby, many hugging each other and some crying as they waited for news.

Her voice breaking, one woman, Alexandra Onishchenko, said she was beginning to lose hope that her son was still alive.

"What grounds blast."

A criminal investigation has been opened into possible safety violations, the Prosecutor General's Office said.

"We need to do everything possible to save the people," Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said in a video conference with rescue leaders on Sunday.

RISING FLOOD WATERS

At Raspadskaya, the country's biggest underground mine, rising flood waters were complicating the efforts of more than 500 people involved in rescue work on Monday, officials said.

Nineteen rescuers were themselves trapped underground after a second blast four hours later reduced several buildings to smouldering ruins and forced a halt to rescue work.

The bodies of 17 rescuers were found after a fall in methane levels allowed colleagues to re-enter the mine. Sixty-five were injured, the Emergencies Ministry said.

Every hour 2,000 cubic meters of water were pouring into two areas of the mine where at least 13 people were trapped, news agencies quoted Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu as saying.

Rescuers restored electricity to the ventilation system, but faced the threat that higher levels of oxygen in the mine would increase the risk of another explosion, Shoigu said.

Raspadskaya is part-owned by steel-and-mining firm Evraz Group. The mine in the city of Mezhdurechensk had reserves of some 450 million tons of coal and produced 8.9 million tons in 2007, according to the Raspadskaya company. It says the pit is the largest underground mine in Russia.

In India, a Pakistani national convicted for his role in the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai has been sentenced to death. He was the only gunman who was captured alive during the daring assaults that killed 166 people in India's financial hub.

Mohammed Ajmal Kasab wiped his face and held his head in his hands as a special court in Mumbai pronounced the death penalty on four counts - murder, waging war against India, conspiracy and terrorism offenses.

Twenty-two-year-old Kasab is the only one who survived out of ten heavily armed gunmen who arrived by sea and mounted attacks on multiple targets in Mumbai in November 2008. Indian authorities say he was a member of the Pakistan-based Islamic militant group, the Laskhar-e-Taiba, which India believes masterminded the attacks.

Kasab and an accomplice killed and wounded scores at the city's main train station.

Pronouncing the sentence, the judge said Kasab's offenses were "of exceptional depravity", and he had lost right to humanitarian treatment. He said the death penalty was necessary to maintain the people's faith in the judicial system.

Mumbai Police Commissioner Himanshu Roy, who was present in the court, says the judge explained that the punishment is in proportion to the crime.

"While imposing the death sentence, he said there was a preponderance of overwhelming circumstances which made the death punishment inevitable, and that there were hardly any mitigating circumstances," said Roy.

The death penalty on Kasab can only be executed once it is confirmed by a high court. There could also be an appeal against it - a process that could take years as it winds its way slowly to the highest court.

In Mumbai - the city which was traumatized by the terror attacks - many people said they were satisfied by the sentence. Several family members of victims of the attacks appeared on domestic television saying they supported the death penalty for Kasab.

The prosecution, which had called Kasab a "killing machine" said the judgment will put balm on the wounds of the victims of the terror attacks. The defense had argued against capital punishment, saying Kasab was brainwashed into committing the offenses.

Indian courts rarely use the death penalty, which is reserved for what the Supreme Court has called the "rarest of rare cases," and is imposed by hanging. No execution has been carried out since 2004 and many appeals for clemency are pending. This includes one from the killers of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1991, and a Kashmiri separatist who attacked India's parliament in 2001.

U.S. officials say a Pakistani-American charged with an attempted car bombing in New York City is cooperating with investigators as they try to determine a motive for the planned attack. Faisal Shahzad was arrested late Monday and charged with trying to blow up a sports utility vehicle in crowded Times Square on Saturday. Meanwhile, authorities in Pakistan say they have made arrests in connection with the failed car bombing.

The man charged with numerous counts of terrorism was born in this tiny northwestern village known as Mohib Banda. Faisal Shahzad's father is a retired air vice marshal in the Pakistani military. He comes from an upper-middle class family. Neighbors in this town of 5,000 are saddened by the news.

"I am weeping for my village; I am weeping for this unfortunate family," Nazirullah Khan, retired school teacher said. "What on earth is going on?"

Some analysts say discontent is bubbling up from the Pakistani middle class because of U.S. restrictions on visas and increased screening after recent bomb attempts. However, Faiz Ahmed, village elders says he knows Shahzad. "He was an absolutely normal person. He had no connection with any religious party or any political party," he recalled.

But police say Shahzad, now a naturalized American citizen, admitted to his role in Saturday night's attempted car bombing. And, that he took bomb making lessons in Pakistan.

The Pakistani Tehrik-e-Taliban, initially claimed responsibility for the attempted act of violence. The group, based along the border with Afghanistan, had been targeting the Pakistani government, not the U.S. But now, counterterrorism research fellow, Brian Fishman, worry the group's reach may go farther. "This is clearly a sign that the group has become closer to al-Qaida and is looking to attack abroad," he said.

Other experts do not believe the Taliban in Pakistan have the resources for such an act. They think Shahzad may have acted alone when they say he parked his car rigged with bomb materials in Times Square. The terrorism attempt comes at a bad time for U.S.-Pakistani relations. Analysts say the two countries were starting to make progress against the Taliban. The U.S. ambassador on Wednesday met with senior Pakistani officials, including President Asif Ali Zardari .

"They recognize as we do, that this is a shared responsibility and a shared threat," said P.J. Crowley of the US State Department.

The most recent threat nearly got away. The 30-year-old Pakistani American was on board this flight, bound for Dubai when pilots heard this from Air Traffic Control:

Federal agents stopped the flight and removed Shahzad, who managed to board the airplane despite being placed on a "no-fly" list hours before. Now, the U.S. government is changing the rules to require airlines to check the no-fly list within two hours after being notified of changes. Legislators on Capitol Hill are also looking at new laws to deny gun and explosive purchases to suspected terrorists.

"We don't want to rob people of a constitutional right but - I kind of don't like saying this, but I'm going to do it, and that is - to err on the side of protection is the chance sometimes we have to take," said Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg from New Jersey.

Shahzad's first appearance in an American courtroom was delayed. Law enforcement officials say they are keeping him busy with interrogations - and that he's giving them significant information.

Witnesses in Somalia's capital say at least eight people have been killed in a land mine explosion.

The blast occurred late Saturday in Mogadishu's Waberi district, near a police station. Witnesses say five members of the security forces were killed, along with at least three civilians.

No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, though friends and relatives of the dead blamed the insurgent group al-Shabab.

Somalia's transitional government is battling Islamist groups who are trying to impose a harsh form of sharia, or Islamic law, on the country.

Earlier on Saturday, the militants fired mortar rounds at the Mogadishu airport, prompting return fire from government troops and African Union peacekeepers.

Reports from the city say at least 10 people were killed, most of them civilians.

The airport is one of the few areas of Mogadishu the government controls. Al-Shabab and another Islamist group, Hizbul Islam, control most of the capital and large parts of southern and central Somalia.

The U.N.-backed government has promised a major offensive against the Islamists for months, but the offensive has yet to materialize.

Somalia has not had a stable central government since 1991.

Some information for this report provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.

A series of explosions in Burma have killed at least nine people and injured scores more.

Officials in Burma say there were three explosions Thursday afternoon in Rangoon, the country's largest city and former capital.

The blasts occurred in a park near Kandawgyi Lake where hundreds of people were celebrating an annual New Year's water festival.

The cause of the blasts is not known but authorities usually point the finger at ethnic rebel groups that have for decades been fighting against the military government.

Burma's military has been moving in on rebel and cease-fire groups to pressure them into submission.

Zin Linn, a spokesman for Burma's government in exile, says many of the armed groups oppose controversial elections the government plans to hold this year and that the explosions are a warning.

"These blasts are signs that if they go ahead with this election, with this constitution, there will be new civil strife, new civil war," he said.

Burma plans to hold its first elections in twenty years sometime later this year but authorities have yet to announce a date.

Rights groups and many western governments have dismissed the elections as a sham designed to keep the military in power.

A 2008 constitution it drafted guarantees the military a quarter of seats in the parliament, regardless of elections. Its election laws force political parties to expel current and former political prisoners from their ranks or face dissolution.

The biggest opposition party, the National League for Democracy, won Burma's last election in 1990 but the military ignored the results. A campaign of arresting and harassing NLD members led many to flee to Thailand where they formed the government in exile.

The authorities have kept the leader of the NLD, Nobel Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, locked up for most of the time since. Her house arrest was extended by 18 months in August for allowing an uninvited American man to stay in her house without official permission.

The NLD has refused to take part in the elections.