Scores lay dead Saturday after a powerful quake and tsunami struck central Indonesia, an AFP photographer at the scene said, as rescuers scrambled to reach the stricken region.
Photographs from Palu, home to around 350,000 people on the coast of Sulawesi island, showed partially covered bodies on the ground near the shore, the morning after tsunami waves 1.5 metres (five feet) high slammed into the city.
The tsunami was triggered by a strong quake that brought down several buildings and sent locals fleeing for higher ground as a churning wall of water crashed into Palu.
Dramatic video footage filmed from the top floor of a parking ramp in Palu, nearly 80 kilometres (50 miles) from the quake’s epicentre, showed waves of water bring down several buildings and inundate a large mosque.
The shallow 7.5 magnitude tremor was more powerful than a series of quakes that killed hundreds on the Indonesian island of Lombok in July and August.
There was no official death toll, but the head of the country’s search and rescue agency Muhammad Syaugi told AFP that local staff had found a large number of dead.
“Many dead bodies, but the exact number we don’t know. We found at 2:00 am many dead bodies in Palu,” he said.
Thirty of the dead and several injured people had been taken to a nearby hospital, the facility’s director told local media.