Parents and rescuers in Indonesia were desperately searching for dozens of teenage boys believed to be trapped, a day after the collapse of an Islamic boarding school which has already left three dead, authorities said.
Authorities said 91 people were listed as missing after the Al Khoziny school building collapsed while pupils held late afternoon prayers in a mosque housed on a lower floor of a building whose upper floors were under construction.
The boarding school is in the East Java town of Sidoarjo, about 780 km (480 miles) east of Jakarta.
By late evening on Tuesday, three bodies had been recovered, with those missing still trapped under huge slabs of concrete. Ninety-nine children and workers at the school were accounted for.
The head of the local rescue agency, Nanang Sigit, told reporters that rescuers had detected signs of life beneath the debris.
“We used a camera and were able to detect six victims who showed signs of life,” he said.
“When they saw the light from the search camera, they were moving their legs.”
Holy Abdullah Arif, 49, wept as he held up a picture on his mobile phone of his nephew Rosi, still listed among the missing. He described his frantic search for the boy in the ruins.
“I ran around screaming, ‘Rosi! Rosi! If you can hear me and can move, get out!’ And then a child was screaming back from the rubble, he was stuck. I thought that was Rosi, so I asked, ‘Are you Rosi?’ and the child said, ‘God, no, help me!’”
Families clustered around a whiteboard with a list of the known survivors, searching for names of their children.
An excavator and a crane had been deployed to help rescuers shift the rubble, but Nanang Sigit, a local search and rescue official, said authorities would not use heavy equipment for fear of causing the remaining structure to collapse.
“The rescuers are still searching for 91 people,” said Abdul Muhari, a spokesperson for the disaster mitigation agency (BNBP), adding that 26 of the injured were still being treated at local hospitals.
The building collapsed after its foundation pillars failed to support the weight of new construction on the fourth floor of the school, according to BNBP spokesperson Abdul Muhari.
He called for stricter safety standards and urged the public and building managers to oversee construction processes more carefully to prevent similar incidents.
Local media reports quoted a school official as saying construction work had been ongoing for the past nine months.
Lax construction standards have raised widespread concerns about building safety in Indonesia, where it is common to leave structures – particularly houses – partially completed, allowing owners to add extra floors later when their budgets permit.
Earlier this month, at least three people were killed and dozens injured when a building hosting a prayer recital collapsed in West Java.
In 2018, seven teenagers rehearsing for a musical show were killed in Cirebon, east of Jakarta, when the building they were in collapsed.
That same year, at least 75 people were injured when the mezzanine floor at Indonesia’s stock exchange building in Jakarta collapsed into the lobby.
With Reuters and Agence France-Presse
