Indonesians use bare hands to dig out bodies; 16 dead in Philippines typhoon

Vice-President Jusuf Kalla said there was little hope of finding anyone alive. “We can be sure that they are dead. So now we are waiting for burials,” he said.

The villages “were sucked 100 feet deep into the earth,” said Rustam Pakaya,the head of Indonesia’s Health Ministry crisis centre.

Survivors in the area said no government aid or search teams had arrived,even four days after the quake. Only about 20 local policemen had come with a power shovel and body bags. The landslides cut off all roads,and the villages were accessible only by foot.

Villagers gathered as men used their bare hands to slowly and cautiously pull corpses. The bodies were bloated and mutilated.

Deliveries came on C-130 cargo planes from the US,Russia and Australia. Japanese,Swiss,South Korean and Malaysian search and rescue teams scoured the debris. Tens

On Sunday,a 5.5-magnitude earthquake shook West Papua,the US Geological Survey said. There were no reports of casualties.

Meanwhile in Philippines,landslides buried two families as they sheltered in their homes from Asia’s latest deadly typhoon,which killed at least 16 people and left more than a dozen villages flooded on Sunday.

Typhoon Parma cut a destructive path across the northern Philippines but spared the capital,Manila. By Sunday afternoon,it was headed toward Taiwan.

Typhoon Parma hit just eight days after an earlier storm left Manila awash in the worst flooding in four decades,killing almost 300 people.