Navy ships and helicopters used in intensified search for 30 missing after Indonesian ferry sinks

GILIMANUK, Indonesia (AP) — Indonesian authorities deployed navy ships and helicopters Friday in the intensified search for 30 people still missing almost two days after a ferry sank near the tourist island of Bali.

More than 160 rescuers including police and soldiers were involved in the search that resumed after being halted overnight due to poor visibility, said Ribut Eko Suyatno, the deputy chief of operations at the National Search and Rescue Agency.

Three helicopters and a thermal drone were searching by air over the Bali Strait, while about 20 vessels and fishing boats were mobilized for the sea search, Suyatno said. As weather forecasts predict high waves and rough waters around the Bali Strait on Friday, he said at least three navy ships were deployed.

Videos and photos released by the agency showed rescuers looking desperately from rescue boats in the waters but no new survivors or bodies found by Friday afternoon.

“We are ready to deploy divers to scour the sea if needed and if the weather is fine,” Suyatno said in a statement.

The KMP Tunu Pratama Jaya ferry sank almost half an hour after leaving Ketapang port in East Java late Wednesday for a trip of about 5 kilometers (3 miles) to Bali’s Gilimanuk port.

The agency released the names of 29 survivors and six people confirmed dead late Thursday. It didn’t release names of the missing, but the passenger manifest showed 30 people still were missing.

On Friday, survivors were being treated at Bali’s Jembrana Regional Hospital, while the bodies have been handed over to the families for funerals. Distraught relatives gathered at the port office in Gilimanuk, hoping for news of missing family members.

Indonesian authorities are investigating the cause of the sinking. Some survivors told rescuers there appeared to be a leak in the engine room of the ferry, which was carrying 22 vehicles including 14 trucks.

But a survivor, Bejo Santoso, in an interview with Metro TV, believed that high waves and strong current as the cause of the accident.

“The high waves hit the ferry several times, causing the vessel rolled to the left when it was halfway to Gilimanuk,” said Santoso who travelled alone to Bali by a travel bus. He recalled how trucks, buses and other cars immediately fell and piled up on the left side of the ferry and within less than five minutes the ship sank.

“It all happened so fast that there was not enough time for the crew to issue instructions,” Santoso said, adding that there were a lot of life jackets in the ferry, but in such a short time, only the people on the outer deck could reach it, including him who immediately threw it overboard before jumping into the sea.

“I didn’t get to wear a life jacket on board, but held it as a floating tool for hours at sea until a fisherman rescued us early morning with his boat,” Santoso said. He estimated that only half of people onboard able to jump to the sea, some with life jackets and others with two lifeboats.

He floated for more than six hours in choppy waters along with three other male passengers, but one of them, who claimed to be suffering from lung disease, died after almost four hours of floating, “due to panic and drinking too much sea water,” Santoso said. The group of three kept the man’s body with them until they were rescued.

Ferry tragedies occur regularly in Indonesia, an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, with weak enforcement of safety regulations often to blame.

Fifteen people were killed after a boat capsized off Indonesia’s Sulawesi in 2023, while another ferry sank in rough seas near Bali in 2021, leaving seven dead and 11 missing.

In 2018, an overcrowded ferry sank with about 200 people on board in a deep volcanic crater lake in North Sumatra province, killing 167 people.

In one of the country’s worst recorded disasters, an overcrowded passenger ship sank in February 1999 with 332 people aboard. There were only 20 survivors.

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Associated Press writers Niniek Karmini and Edna Tarigan in Jakarta, Indonesia, contributed to this report.