First British aid arrives in quake-hit Sulawesi

THE first British aid has arrived on the devastated island of Sulawesi in Indonesia.

An RAF A400M Atlas aircraft has successfully delivered 17.5tons of UK aid supplies to the international relief centre at Balikpapan, the humanitarian operational hub for the region affected by the earthquake and tsunami last week.

In addition, the UK Government has also announced it will match poundfor-pound the first £2 million raised by the British public to the Indonesia Tsunami Appeal.

After days of delays, international aid is slowly making its way to the disaster zone, where the UN says almost 200,000 people need humanitarian assistance.

More than a thousand people could still be missing after the natural disasater, officials said yesterday, drastically increasing the estimated number of people unaccounted for.

Palu city on Sulawesi island has been left in ruins after it was hit by the powerful quake and a wall of water that flattened entire neighbourhoods.

The official death toll now stands at 1,571.

The number of confirmed missing stands at over 100, but fears are growing that vast numbers of people have been buried in a massive government housing complex at Balaroa, where the sheer force of the quake turned the earth temporarily to mush.

“Maybe more than 1,000 people are still missing,” Yusuf Latif, a spokesman for Indonesia’s search and rescue agency, told AFP. “But we still cannot be sure because there’s a possibility that some people managed to get out. We have to use heavy equipment now because it is very difficult to sift through the rubble by hand.”

Security forces have rounded up dozens of suspected looters and warn they will fire on thieves. Survivors have ransacked shops and supply trucks in the hunt for basic necessities.