Spanish
A week after the collapse of an Islamic boarding school in Indonesia while students were praying on the ground floor, authorities raised to 65 on Monday the number of deaths from the incident, while it is believed that around a dozen people could still be under the rubble.
The head of the national rescue agency (Basarnas), Mohammad Syafii, reported at a press conference that 11 bodies were recovered from the wreckage of the building in the last few hours, just as a week has passed since the collapse.
"We will consider this operation (search) finished once we are sure that all debris has been separated (...). This could be completed later or perhaps tomorrow," he stated.
Rescuers indicated early this Monday that, taking into account information from the boarding school, at least nine people could still be trapped in the building, although Syafii avoided commenting on the number of missing persons in the appearance he offered later.
The Al-Khoziny boarding school, located in the Sidoarjo regency, in East Java, the most populous island in Indonesia, suffered a collapse of its upper floors last Monday at 3:35 PM local time (8:35 GMT), when a group of workers were pouring cement as part of construction work.
The authorities pointed to the lack of strength of the center's foundations as the cause of the collapse, to which 104 people survived.
Rescue teams deployed at the boarding school said on Thursday that they were not detecting signs of human life under the rubble and, after agreeing with representatives of the families, began search and evacuation tasks with heavy machinery, which had been avoided until then due to the risk it poses to the safety of potential survivors.
Several families with no news of their loved ones settled near the ruined center and spent nights in a small mosque near the boarding school, which housed students up to 20 years old under an educational curriculum mainly focused on Islamic studies, in the country with the most Muslims in the world.
