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TAWANGMANGU, Indonesia : Hundreds of Indonesian rescuers resumed a grim hunt Thursday for victims of landslides and floods on Java island that have left more than 130 people feared dead, officials said.
Landslides hit two districts in Central Java in the early hours of Wednesday morning, engulfing entire homes and blocking key access roads, while floods swelling in East Java swept away a bridge, leaving an estimated 50 missing.
"This is still an estimate - there were many people passing the bridge at the time according to witnesses," a policeman at Madiun district police station told AFP early Thursday.
"A rescue and search team together with a Brimob paramilitary unit have been trying to search for victims. The search is not easy as the current is still very strong," he added.
The Kompas newspaper reported that the 50-metre (-yard) long bridge was built in the Dutch colonial period.
In Central Java, hundreds of troops, police, local officials and residents used their hands along with hoes and shovels searching for bodies, with roads still unpassable into several of the main affected areas, officials said.
In worst-hit Karanganyar district, the head of the local disaster management centre Heru Aji Pratomo said two more bodies were pulled from the muddy wreckage of one landslide, bringing the number of bodies recovered to 38.
Twenty-eight people were still missing in the district, he told AFP.
Pratomo said rescuers were "using four water pumps and plastic pipes to disperse mud as thick as five metres (yards) covering the bodies."
An AFP correspondent on the scene at the district's Tawangmangu area said about 130 members of the elite army force Kopassus arrived Thursday to help the search.
The weather had cleared, he said.
A witness in Tawangmangu said that the landslide had felt like an earthquake.
"Suddenly I felt my house shaking, and I thought it was an earthquake. When I got outside, I saw that the houses next to mine were already covered by earth," resident Siswo told AFP.
Twelve of his neighbours' homes were hit, he added.
In adjacent Wonogiri district, the head of the disaster management centre told AFP that four people had been found and 13 were missing.
An earlier toll of six was incorrect, with two of those people only injured, he said.
Indonesia has been repeatedly afflicted by deadly floods and landslides in recent years, with activists warning that logging and a failure to reforest denuded land in the world's fourth most populous country are often to blame.
But in Central Java, officials insisted deforestation was not to blame.
"There's no deforestation here," said Wonogiri district's Mubadi, explaining that the incidents had occurred in hilly areas.
"The hills are unstable and vulnerable to landslides anyway," he said.
Officials have said they expect the recovery of all landslide victims to take at least another two days. - AFP/ch
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