JAKARTA—At least 15 people were murdered when a tiny ferry collapsed during a brief 20-minute ride on Indonesia's Sulawesi island on Monday, according to the national search and rescue agency.
The remaining 33 passengers on board were rescued following the accident on Sunday night, according to the agency, which added that two of the casualties were hospitalized.
The rescue service published photos of victims draped in fabric on the hospital floor.
The cause of the sinking, which occurred about midnight, remained unknown.
The boat was ferrying people across a 1 kilometer (just over half a mile) distance at Muna island, some 200 kilometers (124 miles) south of Kendari, the capital of Southeast Sulawesi Province. The travel between two tiny communities on each side of Mawasangka Bay was supposed to take only 20 minutes.
The agency reported that teams searching for the missing were diving near the wreckage of the ship and exploring adjacent seas in rubber boats.
In Indonesia, an archipelago of over 17,000 islands, ferries are a major means of transportation, and accidents are prevalent because inadequate safety rules frequently enable vessels to be overcrowded without proper life-saving equipment.
