No more signs of life in Indonesia school collapse, with 59 still missing: Rescuers
October 2, 2025 12:16 pm
Rescuers detected “no more signs of life” under the rubble of a collapsed Indonesian school where 59 people remain missing, an official said Thursday (Oct 2), raising fears that no more survivors would be found.
“We used high-tech equipment like thermal drones, and, scientifically, there were no more signs of life,” said Suharyanto, the head of the country’s disaster mitigation agency, during a press briefing at the site of Monday’s collapse in eastern Java.
The Al Khoziny boarding school, located in the East Java town of Sidoarjo about 780km east of Jakarta, collapsed when its foundations could not support ongoing construction work on the upper floors, crushing dozens of students who were praying and trapping them under rubble.
Rescuers had been racing against time to extricate those trapped.
Five survivors were pulled from the rubble on Wednesday.
Abdul Muhari, spokesperson with the disaster mitigation agency, said in a statement on Thursday that 59 people remained trapped, based on the school’s list of absences and missing person reports filed by families.
Rescuers found no signs of life on Thursday after calling out the names of the victims and using motion detectors and scanners to track movements or vital signs, search and rescue agency official Emi Freezer told Reuters.
In signature orange uniform, rescuers crawled through narrow tunnels to find students trapped under rubble, according to photos distributed by the agency.
A crane has been deployed on Thursday to lift light, unconnected debris.
Al Khoziny is an Islamic school known locally as a pesantren.
Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, has a total of about 42,000 pesantren, serving 7 million students, according to data from the country’s religious affairs ministry.
Waiting along with other anxious parents convening around a whiteboard showing a list of survivors, Ahmad Ikhsan, 52, was still holding out hope that his 14-year-old son, Arif Affandi, would be found.
“Until now, I haven’t heard about my son,” he said. “I believe my son is still alive.”
- Agencies
