This conclusion about the cause of the disaster contradicts Robert E. Murray, the chief executive of the Murray Energy Corporation, which owns and operates the mine. Mr. Murray has adamantly insisted that the initial fatalities were not foreseeable because the collapse was caused by an earthquake rather than by mining operations.

Federal mining officials, who have publicly expressed skepticism that an earthquake caused the collapse, are due to release their own investigation report in June.

The counsel for Murray Energy, Kevin N. Anderson, attacked the report and accused Mr. Miller of disclosing “unfounded conclusions” and trying “to concoct a criminal referral concerning the tragedy.”

He said in a statement that the company was more interested to see what federal mine safety officials found in their investigation. He added that the call for a criminal investigation was a “callous inference” based on “a radically incomplete review of the facts.”

But a lawyer for relatives of the dead miners said the findings in the report were troubling.

“The nine miners who died would all be alive today if Murray Energy had heeded the clear warning signs that were there to see after the March bounce,” said Colin King, a lawyer in Salt Lake City. “Instead the company continued with its same plan to pull out all the coal because of their greed and that makes their conduct worse than negligent.”

He said the families filed a lawsuit against the company last month.

At the time of the disaster, the mining company was conducting retreat mining, a risky type of extraction that requires miners to remove coal from the very pillars that hold up the tunnels, allowing controlled roof collapses. Aside from missing clear warnings, mine operators seemed to have tried to conceal their own culpability, the report said.

Deposed by the committee, one federal mining official, Allyn Davis, who inspected photographs of the mine after the March bump, said that the images differed significantly from the description of the event given to him by the mine manager, Laine Adair.