A deadly maritime accident has left one person dead and 23 others unaccounted for after a passenger boat sank while en route to an Indonesian island, local officials confirmed Thursday in a statement to reporters. The incident unfolded Wednesday morning, when the KM Nurul Salsa departed the port of Jampea Island carrying 70 passengers and crew members, along with a cargo of copra, cattle, and motorcycles. By Wednesday afternoon, emergency management authorities received an urgent distress report stating the vessel had suffered total engine failure and was going down roughly 43 nautical miles, or 79 kilometers, from its intended destination: the port of the Selayar Islands in South Sulawesi Province. As of Thursday, search and rescue teams have pulled 46 survivors from the water, but efforts to locate the remaining 23 missing people have been severely hampered by treacherous meteorological conditions, according to Muhammad Arif Anwar, leader of the Makassar Search and Rescue Office. “The primary challenge we face right now is the weather,” Anwar explained in an interview. “At the search site, waves are reaching 2 to 2.5 meters in height, and wind speeds remain high. That is the main obstacle holding back our operations.” The multi-agency search mission brings together personnel from the Indonesian National Armed Forces, the National Police, local commercial fishermen, and community residents, all working around the clock to locate the missing passengers. Maritime accidents are an all-too-common occurrence across Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago made up of more than 17,000 individual islands that relies heavily on small passenger vessels as a primary mode of inter-island transportation. Longstanding issues including lax regulatory oversight of vessel safety standards and repeated overcrowding have created a pattern of frequent deadly accidents in the region’s waters. This report included contributions from Associated Press correspondent Edna Tarigan based in Jakarta, Indonesia.
1 person dead and 23 missing after passenger boat sinks in Indonesia, authorities say
