NAHA, Japan — Taiwan grounded its fleet of Boeing 737-800 jetliners after a China Airlines plane exploded in a fireball Monday on the tarmac in Okinawa, and officials said a fuel leak may be to blame. All 165 passengers and crew scrambled down emergency chutes or jumped from cockpit windows — some just seconds before the blast.

Passengers described a normal landing after Flight CI-120 landed on the resort island of Okinawa from the Taiwanese capital of Taipei. But as the jet came to a stop near the terminal, they said the left engine began smoking.

Okinawa Airport traffic controllers had received no report from the pilot indicating anything was wrong as the plane came in to land and even as it stopped near the terminal to unload passengers, said Japanese Transport Ministry official Akihiko Tamura.

When the smoke started billowing outside the plane, the cabin crew already was standing by the doors, said a passenger.

"The passengers saw the smoke first and they began to yell and demand that the doors be opened," he said.

Tamura said the fire started "when the left engine exploded a minute after the aircraft entered the parking spot."

Inside the plane, passengers recalled a scene of panic.

"When the smoke started, people were just pushing and shoving each other," said an unidentified female Taiwanese passenger. "It was total chaos."

XINTAI, China — A quick outburst of violence by relatives of 172 miners trapped in a flooded coal mine brought a tearful promise of Chinese government action Monday, even as state media said the miners' chances for survival were dwindling.Several mines in the hilly eastern China area said worries about flooding caused them to shut down Friday morning, raising questions about why the Huayuan Mining Co. continued to operate. A dike collapsed later that day, flooding the Huayuan mine and stranded the 172, as well as nine others in a smaller mine run by another company.Water levels fell slightly in the 2,800-foot deep Huayuan mine Monday as industrial pumps began pulling off water, an expert involved in the effort said. Even so the government's Xinhua News Agency said hopes of finding survivors were fading.Already high tempers among the miner's families boiled over Monday. Two brothers of a missing miner and his grown son, frustrated that an earlier request for a briefing had not been met, and two other men smashed a reception window and display cases at a company offices with wooden sticks. They later formed a sit-down protest.