JAKARTA (dpa): The death toll from the collapse of a four-story Islamic boarding school in Indonesia's East Java Province has risen to 14, officials said on Saturday.
The Al Khoziny boarding school in Sidoarjo district crumbled on Monday during a concrete-pouring operation, trapping scores of students, most of them teenagers.
Suharyanto, the head of the National Disaster Management Agency, said that of the 167 people believed to have been inside the school when it fell, 118 had been accounted for, including 103 survivors.
"That means 49 are still being searched for," he told a press conference.
Suharyanto said victim identification had been complicated by the fact that most of the victims were under 18 and did not have government identity cards or fingerprint records.
"Some of the bodies were too badly damaged to be recognized visually," he said.
Rescue workers have cleared about 40% of the debris, slowed by massive concrete beams that cannot be removed without heavy machinery, he said.
But he said the use of excavators and cranes has been carefully limited to avoid damaging bodies still trapped beneath the rubble. - dpa
