Indonesian rescuers digging through rubble find 330 bodies

GUNUNG SITOLI, Indonesia — Indonesians searched through smoldering rubble for survivors on Nias island Tuesday and relatives wept over the bodies of the dead after an 8.7-magnitude earthquake hammered the region, triggering a tsunami scare and killing at least 330 people. Some officials said the death toll could rise as high as 2,000.

U.N. and other relief agencies rushed to ferry aid supplies to the island, which bore the brunt of the quake almost three months to the day after an even bigger temblor nearby sent waves crashing into coastlines around the Indian Ocean's rim, killing at least 174,000 people.

Fears of a second tsunami faded Tuesday when seas failed to rise up in the hours after the overnight quake, but at least 13 aftershocks between magnitudes 5.0 and 6.1 kept nervousness high.

In Gunung Sitoli, the biggest town on the island of some 600,000 people, an Associated Press reporter saw many residents huddled around candles outside their homes, too fearful to spend the night indoors after the aftershocks that set some buildings swaying.

Budi Atmaji Adiputro, a spokesman for Indonesia's Coordinating Agency for National Disaster Relief, said rescuers found 330 bodies in the rubble Tuesday. The toll was expected to rise because more bodies were believed to be trapped in collapsed buildings, he said.

Vice President Jusuf Kalla told the el-Shinta radio station in Jakarta that the death toll could rise to 1,000-2,000, based on the amount of destruction to buildings. Other officials said the dead numbered in the hundreds, not thousands.

From the air, it appeared that about 30 percent of buildings in Gunung Sitoli were destroyed, and the island's second biggest town, Teluk Dalam, suffered significant damage.

An Associated Press Television News cameraman who landed briefly in the city said he saw at least one dead body and about four injured islanders who had yet to receive medical treatment.

At least two fires smoldered in Gunung Sitoli. About 1,000 people gathered in a large field in the town.

A soccer pitch in the town was turned into a makeshift triage center, with about 10 badly injured survivors — some of them lying on wooden doors — awaiting evacuation by relief agency helicopters. People swarmed around U.N. helicopters as they landed to deliver relief supplies.

Elsewhere, a steeple had been knocked off a church on the mainly Christian island.