MAUMERE: The death toll after a motorboat carrying hundreds caught fire in eastern Indonesia has risen in order to 17, officials said on Tuesday (Oct 25).
The KM Exhibit Cantika 77 erupted into flames from the coast of Timor island in Eastern Nusa Tenggara state on Monday, compelling desperate passengers to jump overboard.
The boat’s top deck set drop as it sailed through provincial capital Kupang to the town of Kalabahi on Alor island.
Your head of a local search and rescue agency, I Putu Sudayana, said the dying toll had increased from 14 right after three bodies were found at sea per day after the incident.
Rescuers found 312 survivors and retrieved 17 bodies following the fire at ocean, Sudayana said.
He said the search operation would continue for a week as the number of travellers was unconfirmed.
“It’s not clear, because the (passenger) manifest is not really certain, ” this individual told AFP.
Isyak Nuka, your head of East Nusa Tenggara transportation agency, gave the same passing away toll but a lower number of 311 survivors after the fire.
“We don’t exactly know how many people were on board, because the variety of survivors is already more than the (passenger) manifest of 167 individuals, ” he told AFP.
Ocean accidents are common within the Southeast Asian islands of around seventeen, 000 islands, where safety standards in many cases are lax.
Within 2018, more than a hundred and fifty people drowned when a ferry sank with the world’s deepest ponds on Sumatra island.