Later on Tuesday, the death toll rose sharply from 162 to 268: Indonesia earthquake
Rescuers in Indonesia are searching for people stranded by an earthquake in West Java for a second night.
Officials placed the death toll at 268 people, many of them youngsters, with 151 people still missing and over 1,000 wounded.
Road damage and the large extent of the impacted region make it difficult to find and rescue victims.
The National Disaster Mitigation Agency said that 22,000 homes had been destroyed and that over 58,000 people had sought refuge in various sites around the region.
On Monday, a 5.6-magnitude earthquake slammed a hilly region, triggering landslides that buried entire villages near the West Java town of Cianjur.
After walls and roofs collapsed, victims were crushed or trapped. “Everything occurred so fast,” Aprizal (Aprizal Mulyadi was at school when the quake hit) told the AFP news agency.
A spokesperson from the National Search and Rescue Agency revealed that many of those killed were youngsters.
The earthquake, which hit at a shallow depth of 10 kilometres (six miles), was followed by hundreds of aftershocks, which caused more damage as poorly constructed dwellings fell. Victims in one location carried cardboard placards requesting food and shelter.
In this hour of grief, India stands with Indonesia, according to a tweet from Narendra Modi.
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