Almost 140 missing after passenger ferry loses contact in rough seas

One person has died and around 140 people are missing after contact was lost with a passenger ferry between a pair of Indonesian islands.

Search and rescue officials have saved 103 people from the Virgo Transport 8 ship after it encountered bad weather and rough seas between Java and Borneo.

The vessel was last reported to be just under 150km from its destination of Banjarmasin in the south of Borneo, at 2am local time today.

It had set off from Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city after the capital Jakarta, carrying 243 passengers and crew.

The country’s search and rescue agency earlier said: ‘At the time of this statement, the ship cannot be contacted and its whereabouts are unknown.’

I Putu Sudayana, the local head of the agency, told reporters: ‘We have carried out efforts to search for victims to the fullest extent.

‘There were passengers who had already been successfully evacuated by the units at the scene. We can inform you that the total number of evacuated passengers is 103 people.’

Some of the people who were evacuated would be taken to a port in East Java, he said.

He added that authorities later gained information that indicated the ferry had overturned.

Ships and a helicopter have been deployed to track down survivors.

Ferries are a common mode of transport in Indonesia, an archipelago containing 17,000 islands.

But the services have a relatively high accident rate as safety standards are not always rigorously enforced.

Last month, a separate ferry caught fire near Madura, an island that lies off the coast of Surabaya. Five people died in the incident.

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