Scores missing after Indonesia ship wreck

Bad weather is making the search for survivors difficult as most of them are still missing

About 33 people rescued so far after a boat carrying more than 200 migrants sank off the coast of east Java.

A boat believed to be carrying more than 200 migrants, many of them from the Middle East, has sunk off Indonesia's main island of Java, local media reported.
Police blamed the accident on overloading, telling the official news agency Antara on Saturday that the vessel appeared to have been carrying more than twice its capacity.

So far only 33 people have been rescued, Sahrul Arifin, the head of emergency and logistics at the East Java Disaster Mitigation Centre, said.
Bad weather is making the search for survivors difficult as 182 are still missing.
He said strong waves wrecked the wooden boat about 90km out to sea. "Our search and rescue team have begun sweeping the water around where the accident took place but we are now sending body bags to that area."
Al Jazeera’s Step Vaessen, reporting from Indonesian capital Jakarta, said that "chances of finding any more survivors was getting slimmer by the hour as the boat sank almost 20 hours ago".
One of the survivors, Esmat Adine, told Antara that the vessel began rocking from side to side, which triggered widespread panic.
The passengers were very tightly packed, and therefore had nowhere to go, said the 24-year-old Afghan migrant.
"That made the boat even more unstable and eventually it sank," he added.
Overcrowded boat

Adine said that he and others survived by clinging on to parts of the broken vessel until they were picked up by the local fishermen.
He estimated that more than 40 children were on the ship. It was not immediately clear if any were rescued.
"It is another case of an overcrowded boat meeting with disaster. There have been similar accidents in the past as migrants come to Indonesia on their way to Australia," Al Jazeera's Vaessen said.
"Lots of people in Indonesia are involved in the business, basically a big people-smuggling business, where lots of money is involved.
"These people [migrants] pay thousands of dollars to take these journeys."
Indonesia, a sprawling archipelagic nation of 240 million people, has more than 18,000 islands and thousands of kilometres of unpatrolled coastline, making it a key transit point for smuggling migrants.
Those on board on Saturday - apparently heading to Australia - were from Afghanistan, Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.
Last month, a ship carrying about 70 asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan capsized off the southern coast of Central Java; at least eight people died.