Indonesia considers making devastated areas mass graves

Indonesia’s disaster agency said the death toll from the powerful earthquake and tsunami climbed to 1,649, with at least 265 people still missing, though it said that number could be higher. More nations sent aid and humanitarian workers fanned out in the countryside.

The dead were still being recovered more than a week after the double disaster. Eight victims in black body bags of the national search and rescue agency were arranged in a row in the crumpled Palu neighbourhood of Balaroa, destined for a mass grave.

Balaroa was one of the areas hardest hit by the Sept. 28 magnitude 7.5 quake, which threw homes in the neighbourhood tens of meters and left cars upright or perched on eruptions of concrete and asphalt. Many children were in the area’s mosque at the time of the quake for Quran recitation. An assistant to the Imam had said none survived. Indonesia’s top security minister, Wiranto, who uses a single name, said the government is mulling the possibility of turning Balaroa and Petobo, another neighbourhood in Palu, into mass graves. The victims can be considered “martyrs,” he said. 

Wiranto said efforts to retrieve bodies are problematic in those neighborhoods, where homes were sucked into the earth. He said it’s not safe for heavy equipment to operate there. In the dusty one-road village of Pewunu, medical team set up a makeshift clinic in a field where evacuees were sleeping under tarps. One villager said they survived by ransacking shops. People living in the camp said two residents died in collapsing houses in the village.