More than 130 Russian miners trapped underground after sudden flood at diamond mine in Siberia

More than 150 miners were left trapped inside a diamond mine in Siberia when it suddenly flooded - and officials say nine remain missing.

Alrosa, Russia's largest diamond producer, said 102 miners were evacuated and 33 are set to be raised to the surface after water broke through into the mine at around 4.30pm local time today.

But a further nine are currently unaccounted for, with a search operation underway.

The water leaked into one of the mine's pumping stations out of a flooded disused crater that contained some 300,000 cubic metres of water, or the equivalent of 120 Olympic-size swimming pools, the emergency situations ministry said.

Russian television said the rescue operation at the mine in the Sakha region 2,600 miles east of Moscow was hindered by a power cut that stopped the lift system from working.

Alrosa said that 133 people had been evacuated from the mine named Mir, or peace in Russian, while nine people remained unaccounted for. It corrected a previous number of 151 miners inside, saying that nine of those people had in fact not entered the shaft. 

it said a rescue operation was underway and Alrosa's chief executive Sergei Ivanov had flown to the scene.

The emergency situations ministry's branch in the Sakha region where the mine named Mir is located said in a statement that there were 151 people inside. 

It said groundwater had flooded one of the mine's pumping stations.

'At the moment the Sakha's mine rescue brigade is carrying out operations to evacuate the workers,' the ministry said. 

Up to 2001, Alrosa used opencast mining at the Mir site, which has been used for diamond production since 1955. The Mir opencast mine is a vast round crater with a diameter of over a kilometre that is one of the largest manmade holes on Earth.

The last major mining accident in Russia saw 36 people killed by methane explosions that ripped through Severnaya coal mine north of the Arctic Circle in February 2016.

In 2010, 91 people died after a methane explosion at the Raspadskaya coal mine in the Siberian region of Kemerovo.