Indonesia school collapse: three dead and over 90 missing as rescue effort continues

Parents were desperately searching for scores of missing teenage boys feared trapped under huge piles of concrete on Tuesday after a building at an Islamic boarding school collapsed in Indonesia.

Authorities said 91 people were listed as missing at Al Khoziny school after the collapse as 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 780km (480 miles) east of Jakarta.

By late evening on Tuesday, three bodies had been recovered, with the vast majority of presumed victims still trapped under huge slabs of concrete. Ninety-nine children and workers at the school survived.

Relatives of the students at Al Khoziny boarding school came to search for the names of the children on a list of survivors as the rescue operation continued. Photograph: Fully Handoko/EPA

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 the 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.

A rescuer searches for survivors. Those feared buried under the rubble are mostly between the ages of 12 and 17. Photograph: Fully Handoko/EPA

“The rescuers are still searching for 91 people,” said Abdul Muhari, a spokesperson from the national disaster mitigation agency, telling Reuters that 26 of the injured were still being treated at local hospitals.

The agency said the building’s foundations may not have been able to support the weight of construction on its fourth floor.

The Antara state news agency quoted a school caretaker, Abdus Salam Mujib, as saying building work had ended for the day before the prayers but the foundations could not support the construction that had taken place on the floors above.