Several thousand people on Monday paid their last respects to five Bosnian miners killed last week when a gas explosion caused part of a mine to collapse.

"Our brothers, fathers and sons leave today to a better world," Bosnia's Grand Mufti Husein Kavazovic told the mourners who gathered in a Zenica park after he had said a prayer for the dead.

In the multi-ethnic country, populated by Muslims, Catholic Croats and Orthodox Serbs, all five killed miners were Muslims.

"To be a miner does not only mean to have a job," Bosnia's top cleric said.

"It means to be permanently in mission to do good, to one's family, to one's friends, to one's country," Kavazovic added as he stood in front of five coffins wrapped in green cloth.

The victims were then taken for burial at cemeteries in villages around Zenica, in central Bosnia.

The miners were killed on Thursday after an earthquake triggered a gas explosion in the mine of Raspotocje mine outside Zenica. It left 34 miners trapped at some 600 meters (1,970 feet) underground.

After more than 20 hours, 29 miners were rescued.

Among them was 37-year-old Amel Alickovic.

"I cannot believe that I'm here today, that I came to say goodbye to my comrades who were with us, between life and death," he told AFP.

After the evacuation of the survivors on Friday, the efforts to bring to surface the bodies of the five victims dragged on for two more difficult days with other, minor quakes threatening the rescuers.

The coal mines around Zenica, northwest of the capital Sarajevo, are notorious for deadly accidents.

In 1982, 39 miners were killed in an explosion.

In March in the Raspotocje mine, which has been exploited for more than 130 years, 11 miners were injured when a tunnel collapsed.

In one of the worst mining accidents in the world, 180 miners were killed in a gas explosion in August 1990 in the Kreka mine, near the northeastern town of Tuzla.