A search resumed Monday for 17 people reported missing after a ferry fire off the coast of Indonesia’s capital that left at least 23 dead, officials said.
The victims died Sunday when the vessel, Zahro Express, carrying more than 260 people from a port near Jakarta to Tidung, a resort island in the Kepulauan Seribu chain, caught fire, officials said. Most of the passengers were Indonesians celebrating the New Year holiday, according to local media reports.
Dito, an official from the Jakarta Search and Rescue Agency, said at least five ships and a number of speedboats and rubber boats were deployed in the search.
Of the 224 passengers who were rescued, 32 were being treated at three hospitals, said Dito, who uses a single name.
Seply Madreta, an official from the Jakarta Disaster Mitigation Agency, said the fire gutted about half the vessel, and that 23 bodies had been recovered.
Twenty bodies that were found inside the vessel were burned beyond recognition and were transferred to a police hospital for identification, said Col. Umar Shahab of the Jakarta police health department.
Witnesses told MetroTV that the fire broke out about 15 minutes after the ferry left the port of Muara Angke.
The cause of the fire was not immediately clear. Some passengers told local media that they first saw smoke coming from the ferry’s engine.
The director for sea transportation, Tonny Budiono, said the initial suspicion was that the fire was « most probably caused by a short circuit in the engine room.  »
He told a news conference the short circuit might have led to the fuel tank exploding.
TV footage showed people in the water with the ferry in flames in the background. A woman in the water can be heard screaming « Ya Allah! Ya Allah!  » or « Oh God! Oh God!  »
Another woman told the TV station that she and other passengers were rescued by a small boat.
Despite the high number of people who were rescued, the ferry’s manifest showed that only 100 were registered as passengers, along with six crewmen, said Denny Wahyu Haryanto, head of the Jakarta Disaster Mitigation Agency. He said the vessel’s captain was under police investigation over the incident.
Ferry accidents are common in Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelagic nation, with more than 17,000 islands. Many accidents are blamed on lax regulation of boat services.

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The long-running inquiry has looked into whether Israeli and foreign businessmen have offered gifts worth tens of thousands of dollars as well as another unspecified issue, according to the reports.
Attorney general Avichai Mandelblit has reportedly decided to upgrade the inquiry to a criminal probe, though he has yet to confirm this.
Police and Netanyahu’s office declined to comment on Monday.
Public radio said Netanyahu has agreed to be questioned at his residence. It was not clear when it would occur, though some reports said it would not be until 7:00 pm.
Screens were mounted at the entrance to the compound in central Jerusalem in an apparent bid to shield the investigators’ arrival.
In a Facebook post at the weekend, Netanyahu rejected all allegations against him and said his political opponents and some news outlets wanted to bring down his government.
Police have carried out the inquiry in secret over the course of some eight months and recently arrived at an important breakthrough, reports said. Some 50 witnesses are said to have been questioned.
In July, Mandelblit said he had ordered a preliminary examination into an unspecified affair involving Netanyahu, with no details given.
US billionaire and World Jewish Congress president Ronald Lauder has been among those questioned in the probe over gifts he allegedly gave Netanyahu and alleged spending on trips for him, Israeli media reported.
Lauder, whose family founded the Estee Lauder cosmetics giant, has long been seen as an ally of Netanyahu, who in the late 1990s put him in charge of negotiating with then Syrian president Hafez al-Assad.
Netanyahu has acknowledged receiving money from French tycoon Arnaud Mimran, who was sentenced to eight years in prison over a scam amounting to 283 million euros involving the trade of carbon emissions permits and the taxes on them.
Netanyahu’s office said he had received $40,000 in contributions from Mimran in 2001, when he was not in office, as part of a fund for public activities, including appearances abroad to promote Israel.
He has also come under scrutiny over an alleged conflict of interest in the purchase of submarines from a German firm.
Media reports have alleged a conflict of interest over the role played by the Netanyahu family lawyer, David Shimron, who also acts for the Israeli agent of Germany’s ThyssenKrupp, which builds the Dolphin submarines.
Beyond those issues, Israel’s state comptroller released a critical report in May about Netanyahu’s foreign trips, some with his wife and children, between 2003 and 2005 when he was finance minister.
Netanyahu, 67, is in his fourth term as prime minister and currently heads what is seen as the most right-wing government in Israeli history.
He has served as premier for a total of nearly 11 years, fast approaching revered founding father David Ben-Gurion’s 13 years.
Polls have shown that if elections were held today, his Likud party would finish behind the centrist Yesh Atid, but that voters still prefer Netanyahu as prime minister.
The inquiry has led to fierce debate in Israeli politics, with Netanyahu’s allies accusing opposition politicians and some in the news media of unfairly pressuring the attorney general.
Regional Cooperation Minister Tzachi Hanegbi, in comments on army radio on Monday, denounced what he called a « campaign of provocation and incitement » against Mandelblit.
Others have however accused Mandelblit of moving too slowly.
Netanyahu’s predecessor as prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was forced to resign while dogged by corruption allegations.
He entered prison in February and is serving 27 months for corruption, making Olmert the first former Israeli premier to serve jail time.

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“I’m just beginning to write my remarks. But I’m thinking about them as a chance to say thank you for this amazing journey, to celebrate the ways you’ve changed this country for the better these past eight years, and to offer some thoughts on where we all go from here,” Mr. Obama said in a blog post on the White House website.
President Obama is planning an all-out push to save his signature health care program when he gets back to Washington from his Hawaiian vacation….
The president will deliver the address next Tuesday from Chicago, which is where he lived before becoming president.
“Since 2009, we’ve faced our fair share of challenges, and come through them stronger. That’s because we have never let go of a belief that has guided us ever since our founding—our conviction that, together, we can change this country for the better,” he added.
The announcement comes as the first family returns from their annual two-week holiday vacation in Hawaii.
Mr. Obama is set to deliver the address 10 days before Donald Trump’s inauguration. The Obamas plan to stay in Washington, D. C. until Sasha, their younger daughter, graduates from high school.
It’s unclear if Mr. Obama plans to do a final press conference. The last one he held with the White House press corps was at the end of December, just before he departed for Hawaii.

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The daughter of Choi Soon-Sil, the woman at the centre of a corruption scandal that led to the impeachment of South Korea’s President, has been arrested in Denmark after months in hiding, Seoul prosecutors said Monday.
Chung Yoo-Ra, the 20-year-old daughter of the woman dubbed South Korea’s « Rasputin », is one of the figures in the influence-peddling scandal that sparked massive street protests demanding the removal of President Park Geun-Hye.
Danish police arrested Chung Sunday night for overstaying her visa, Korean prosecutors said, adding they were in talks with Danish authorities to have her deported to Seoul.
Choi, a secret confidante of Park, is accused of using her ties with the president to force top firms including Samsung to « donate » nearly $70 million to non-profit foundations Choi then used as her personal ATMs.
She is also accused of using her influence to secure her daughter’s admission to an elite Seoul university, with a state probe revealing the school had admitted Chung at the expense of other candidates with better qualifications.
The revelation touched a raw nerve in education-obsessed South Korea and prosecutors sought to question Chung over her admission to Ewha Women’s University in 2014.
Park stands accused of colluding with Choi to extract money from the firms and also of letting her meddle in state affairs including nominations of top officials, but the president denies all charges against her.
Parliament voted on December 9 to impeach Park over the scandal and her executive powers have been handed to an acting president, Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-Ahn.
The impeachment case is being considered by the Constitutional Court — which has up to six months to reach a ruling — but hundreds of thousands of South Koreans have joined weekly protests calling for Park’s immediate departure from office.
If the impeachment is confirmed, a presidential election will have to be held within 60 days.
Choi, daughter of a controversial religious figure who was close to Park until his death in 1994, is awaiting trial on charges including coercion and abuse of power.
Several professors at Ewha Women’s University, including a former school president, have been investigated for giving Chung preferential treatment.
One professor was arrested over the weekend for allegedly giving Chung a good grade for a class she never attended and forcing his teaching assistants to forge exam records for her.
Top Samsung managers were also investigated as part of the scandal, following accusations the firm indirectly bankrolled Chung’s equestrian training in Germany in a bid to curry policy favour.

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Iraqi officials say a suicide bomber has blown up his explosives-laden vehicle in a bustling market area in Baghdad, killing at least 18 people.
A police officer says the bomber driving a pickup truck attacked an outdoor fruit and vegetable market, daily laborers and a police checkpoint in Baghdad’s eastern Sadr City district. He said up to 25 other people were wounded in that attack.
Two medical officials confirmed casualty figures. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to release information.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack, but it has all the hallmarks of the Islamic State group, which has staged multiple similar attacks in the past. The attack came as French President Francois Hollande started an official visit to Iraq to meet officials and French troops.

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