[Anchor]

A passenger ferry carrying around 240 people has sunk in Indonesia due to worsening weather conditions. So far, six people have died and 129 remain missing.

Reporter Park Chan-beom has the details.

[Reporter]

A passenger ferry floats upside down in the middle of the open sea.

At around 4:10 a.m. yesterday (local time, September 13), authorities received a report that a passenger ferry was sinking in the Java Sea near Banjarmasin, Indonesia.

At the time of the accident, the ferry was carrying a total of 243 people, consisting of 213 passengers and 30 crew members.

The accident has left six people dead and 129 missing so far.

The remaining 108 passengers have been rescued.

[Faisal / Survivor: When the ship started to sink, people panicked and rushed toward the deck. Then the ship began to capsize. There were about 14 of us together at that moment.]

The ill-fated ferry had departed from Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia's second-largest city, at around 10:10 a.m. the day before yesterday, heading toward Banjarmasin. Contact was lost after a transmission reporting bad weather conditions.

The ferry's last recorded location was approximately 148 kilometers away from the Basirih Pier in Banjarmasin, and reports indicate that waves exceeding 2 meters in height were churning in the waters at the time of the accident.

Indonesia's National Search and Rescue Agency, alongside the navy, has deployed 12 vessels to the accident site to search for the missing.

[Ahmad Saudi / Survivor: The women in the economy class cabin probably didn't make it. The ship tilted suddenly, and there were no alarms or announcements at the time.]

In Indonesia, an archipelago nation consisting of 17,000 islands, ships serve as a major means of transportation, and accidents occur frequently as a result.

In 2018, a passenger ferry carrying around 200 people sank near a volcanic crater lake in North Sumatra province, resulting in 167 deaths.

(Video Editing: Park Choon-bae)