Authorities said 31 people had been rescued and 11 were missing on Monday after an Indonesian ferry sank in the Macassar Strait that separates the islands of Sulawesi and Borneo.
Several tugboats and fishing boats lifted survivors and brought them ashore after the sunken KM Ladang Pertiwi crossed the strait in the middle of the Southeast Asian archipelago on Thursday. “31 people have been rescued and we are still looking for 11 missing people,” a local rescue team commander told AFP on Monday. He added that the survivors “returned home in generally good health.” Rescuers deployed a helicopter and expanded the search area to 20 nautical miles around the flood site.
The official said the ship did not have a license to carry passengers, and the captain and owner were called in for questioning. There was no passenger list, but authorities estimated that 42 people were on the ferry at the time of the accident. Accidents at sea are common in Indonesia, an archipelago of 17,000 islands where safety standards are not met regularly. Last week, a ferry carrying 839 people ran aground for two days in the Eastern Province of Nusa Tenggara. As a result of the incident, no one was injured. About 160 people died in 2018 when a ferry sank in one of the deepest lakes in the world, on the island of Sumatra.
