The bodies of 34 children have been found under a church in Palu, Indonesia that was buried by the devastating earthquake and tsunami which struck the island of Sulawesi on Friday.
Rescuers said the children, taking part in a Christian bible study camp, had huddled together for shelter in the church when a powerful mudslide hit the region.
Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, ordered more rescue workers be deployed to Palu and the surrounding region on Tuesday as the full scale of the destruction began to emerge. Officials raised the confirmed death toll from 844 to 1,234 and said it is expected to continue to rise into the thousands.
"The are some main priorities that we must tackle and the first is to evacuate, find and save victims who've not yet been found," Mr Widodo told a government meeting to coordinate disaster recovery efforts.
Tensions are growing between armed police and survivors in Palu, as people fight over the limited food aid available. Officers fired warning shots into the air on Tuesday and aimed tear gas at people trying to loot a small shop, according to one BBC News reporter.
Nearly 60,000 people have been displaced and are in need of emergency help, while thousands have been streaming out of stricken areas. Power remains shut off in most of the region.
The Red Cross said the situation was “nightmarish”. Its workers have only just started reaching one cut-off area - Donggala, a region of 300,000 people north of Palu and close to the epicentre of the 7.5-magnitude quake - and said indications are that it has been hit "extremely hard".
The bodies of the 34 bible students were found in Sigi Biromaru, just outside Palu, on Tuesday. They were among 86 children reported missing from the camp at the Jonooge Church Training Centre, and officials fear more could be trapped under the rubble of the church and other buildings.
The Indonesian Red Cross said the bodies were still being retrieved and the ages and identities of the children could not be confirmed, such were the “terrible” conditions created by the mudslide. Just reaching the site involved a 1.5-hour walk through mud from the nearest accessible road, a spokesperson told the BBC.
The four worst-hit districts on Sulawesi have a combined population of about 1.4 million people. Most of the confirmed dead have been in the small city of Palu, 1,500 km (930 miles) northeast of Jakarta.
The quake triggered tsunami waves as high as six metres (20 feet) that smashed into the city's beachfront, while hotels and shopping malls collapsed in ruins and some neighbourhoods were swallowed up by ground liquefaction.
About 50 people were believed to have been caught inside the seven-storey Hotel Roa Roa when it was brought down by the tsunami. Three have been rescued alive, while nine bodies have been recovered so far including one more on Tuesday.
Officials are poring over blueprints of the hotel to try and identify areas where space pockets might have emerged. “We suspect there are still some survivors trapped inside,” the head of one rescue team, Agus Haryono, told the Reuters news agency at the site.
Indonesia has said it would accept offers of international aid, having shunned outside help earlier this year when an earthquake struck the island of Lombok.
Aftershocks have rattled jangled nerves.
A particular horror in several areas in and around Palu was liquefaction, which happens when soil shaken by an earthquake behaves like a liquid.
About 1,700 houses in one neighbourhood were swallowed up, with hundreds of people believed buried, the national disaster agency said.
Before-and-after satellite pictures show a largely built-up neighbourhood just south of Palu's airport seemingly wiped clean of all signs of life by liquefaction.
Elsewhere on the outskirts of Palu, lorries brought 54 bodies to a mass grave dug in sandy soil.
Most of the bodies had not been claimed, a policeman said, but some relatives turned up to pay respects to loved ones at the 50 metre (165 feet) trench, where the smell of decomposition was overpowering.
"It's OK if he's buried in the mass grave, it's better to have him buried fast," said Rosmawati Binti Yahya, 52, whose husband was among those placed in the grave, before heading off to look for her missing daughter.
Additional reporting by agencies
