Sidoarjo, East Java, Indonesia – Hopes for dozens of students feared trapped in rubble at a collapsed boarding school have turned to anguish as authorities shift their focus from rescue to recovery.Suharyanto, the head of Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency, told a news conference on Thursday that thermal drones and other equipment had found “no additional signs of life” at Al-Khoziny Islamic Boarding School.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listRelatives of the missing students collapsed in the streets around the site and wailed in anguish upon hearing the news.Authorities said they would bring in heavy machinery to assist in recovery efforts.Until now, they had resisted bringing in excavators to clear the debris for fear of harming anyone trapped alive.Authorities have sealed off the school, which officials say collapsed as construction workers were laying concrete on the building’s fourth floor, as rescuers continue to painstakingly pick through the debris for the 59 people believed missing.But even hundreds of metres from the scene, the smell of decomposing bodies was overwhelming. Police tape around the site of the school collapse in Sidoarjo, East Java, Indonesia, on October 2, 2025 [Aisyah Llewellyn/Al Jazeera]The missing are “all dead”, said a junior police officer standing guard at the scene, asking not to be named.He said it had long been suspected that most of the students trapped inside the school had perished.Family members who have been sleeping at the scene since Monday, when the building collapsed, lined up at an on-site tent on Thursday to give DNA samples in the hopes of identifying t …
