The number of students confirmed dead after the collapse of an Islamic boarding school building in Indonesia rose to 36, from 16 a day earlier, the country’s disaster mitigation agency said on Sunday (October 5, 2025).

Efforts continued for a seventh day to search for the bodies of 27 students still declared missing — mostly teenage boys from the ages of 13 to 19 — trapped under the rubble, the agency said.

Cranes were deployed to excavate debris and search and evacuation efforts were 60% complete, according to the agency, which said it expected to clear all debris and finish the search on Monday.

The Al Khoziny school in the town of Sidoarjo in East Java province caved in last Monday, collapsing on top of hundreds of teenage students during afternoon prayers, its foundations unable to support ongoing construction work on its upper floors.

On Friday, rescuers received the parents’ permission to make use of heavy equipment after failing to find signs of life during previous efforts.

Rescuers dug through tunnels in the remains of the building, calling out the boys’ names and using sensors to detect any movement, but found no signs of life.

Al Khoziny is an Islamic boarding school known locally as a pesantren.

Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, has about 42,000 pesantren serving 7 million students, according to religious affairs ministry data.

The bodies of three boys were pulled early on Friday (October 3, 2025) from beneath the rubble of a school that collapsed in Indonesia and with more than 50 students still unaccounted for the death toll was expected to rise, authorities said.

Rescue crews had been working by hand since the collapse of the school on Monday as they searched for survivors, but with no more signs of life detected by Thursday they turned to heavy excavators equipped with jackhammers to help them progress more rapidly.

The structure fell on top of hundreds of people in a prayer hall at the century-old al Khoziny Islamic boarding school in Sidoarjo on the eastern side of Indonesia’s Java island.

The students were mostly boys in grades seven to 12, between the ages of 12 and 19. Female students were praying in another part of the building and managed to escape, survivors said.

Eight students have been confirmed dead and about 105 injured, many with head injuries and broken bones, and 55 remain unaccounted for.

Two of the bodies found on Friday were in the prayer hall area and one was found closer to an exit as if he had been attempting to escape, according to Suharyanto, the head of Indonesia’s National Disaster Mitigation Agency, who goes by one name as is common in Indonesia.

Authorities have said the building was two stories, but two more levels were being added without a permit. Police said the old building’s foundation apparently was unable to support two floors of concrete and collapsed during the pouring process.

School officials have not yet commented.

Crews worked in the hot sun on Friday to break up and remove large slabs of concrete, with the smell of decomposing bodies a grim reminder of what they would find underneath.

Suharyanto told reporters at the scene that the recovery efforts were expected to be complete by the end of Saturday.