The death toll following the collapse of an Islamic boarding school in Indonesia has tragically risen to 36.
This is up from 16 just a day prior, the nation’s disaster mitigation agency confirmed on Sunday.
Search and rescue operations are now in their seventh day, as teams desperately scour the rubble for 27 students still unaccounted for.
These missing individuals are predominantly teenage boys, aged between 13 and 19, who remain trapped beneath the debris.
Cranes were deployed to excavate debris and search and evacuation efforts were 60 per cent complete, according to the agency, which said it expected to clear all debris and finish the search on Monday.
The Al Khoziny school in the town of Sidoarjo in East Java province caved in last Monday, collapsing on top of hundreds of teenage students during afternoon prayers, its foundations unable to support ongoing construction work on its upper floors.
On Friday, rescuers received the parents’ permission to make use of heavy equipment after failing to find signs of life during previous efforts.
Rescuers dug through tunnels in the remains of the building, calling out the boys’ names and using sensors to detect any movement, but found no signs of life.
Al Khoziny is an Islamic boarding school known locally as a pesantren.
Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, has about 42,000 pesantren serving 7 million students, according to religious affairs ministry data.
