STORY TO BE TOLD

Death toll from Indonesian volcano tops 100

MOUNT MERAPI, Indonesia (AP): The death toll from Indonesia's volcano has climbed to 102 in more than a week after a blistering gas cloud ripped through a mountainside village.

Hospital spokesman Heru Nugroho said 58 bodies were brought in after the inferno. More than 70 others were injured, many of them critically with burns.

Men with ash-covered faces streamed down Mount Merapi on motorcycles followed by truckloads of women and crying children, following the massive eruption just before midnight Friday.

Soldiers helped clear the bodies from the hard-hit village of Bronggang, located 9 miles (15 kilometers) from the crater, and up until Friday considered to be within the "safe zone."

The toll since Oct. 26 - including 44 killed before Friday's massive gas burst - stood at 102.

Dozens of injured - clothes, blankets and even mattresses fused to their skin by the 1,400 degree Fahrenheit (750 degree Celsius) gas clouds - were carried away on stretchers.

"We're totally overwhelmed here!" said Heru Nogroho, a spokesman at the Sardjito hospital, as the number of bodies dropped off at their morgue climbed to 54 - making it the deadliest day Mount Merapi has seen in nearly 80 years.

Merapi's booming explosion just after midnight was six times as powerful as its initial blast on Oct. 26 and triggered a panicked evacuation. Men with ash-covered faces streamed down the scorched slopes on motorcycles, followed by truckloads of women and children, many crying.

Officials wearing facemasks barked out orders on bullhorns as rocks and debris rained from the sky.

Up until Friday, the village of Bronggang, home to around 80 families, was considered to be within the safety zone, despite signs that the notoriously unpredictable mountain could be ready to blow.

Mount Merapi, which means "Fire Mountain," has erupted many times in the last century.

In 1994, over a period of several days, 60 people were killed, while in 1930, more than a dozen villages were torched, leaving up to 1,300 dead.

The greatest danger is always pyroclastic flows, like those that roared down the southern slopes just before midnight Friday at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour (100 kilometers per hour).

With many bodies found in front of houses or littering streets it appeared that many of the villagers died from the searing gas while trying to flee, said Col. Tjiptono, a deputy police chief.

Activity at the mountain forced an airport in nearby Yogyakarta to close Friday because runways were covered in heavy white ash. It was not clear when it would reopen, said Agus Andriyanto, who oversees operations.

Mount Merapi's "danger zone," meanwhile, was extended by three miles (five kilometers) to 12 miles (20 kilometers) from the crater's smoldering mouth after the new eruption, said Subandrio, a state volcanologist.

Even scientists from Merapi's monitoring station were told they had to pack up and move down the mountain. They were scrambling to repair four of their five seismographs destroyed by the heavy soot showers.

Despite earlier predictions that dozens of big explosions that followed Merapi's initial Oct. 26 blast would ease pressure building up behind a magma dome, eruptions have been intensifying, baffling experts who have long monitored Merapi.

"I don't want to speculate if there's going to be a bigger eruption," said Syamsu Rizal, a state expert on volcanos. "But there's no indication at stage that we're going to see it see quiet down at all in the near future."

More than 75,000 people living along Merapi's fertile slopes have been evacuated to crowded emergency shelters, many by force, in the last week. Some return to their villages during lulls in activity, however, to tend to their livestock.

Before Friday, the death toll from Merapi stood at 44, with most of the victims in the first, Oct. 26 blast.

Indonesia, a vast archipelago of 235 million people, is prone to earthquakes and volcanos because it sits along the Pacific "Ring of Fire," a horseshoe-shaped string of faults that lines the Pacific Ocean.

The volcano's initial blast occurred less than 24 hours after a towering tsunami slammed into the remote Mentawai islands on the western end of the country, sweeping entire villages to sea and killing at least 428 people.

There, too, thousands of people were displaced, many living in government camps.

No survivors in Cuba airliner crash

HAVANA (AP): A Cuban airliner flying from the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba to the capital crashed in mountains after declaring an emergency Thursday evening, killing all 68 people aboard, including 28 foreigners, authorities said.

AeroCaribbean Flight 883 went down near the village of Guasimal in Santi Spiritus province, carrying 61 passengers and a crew of seven.

Cuba's Civil Aviation Authority issued a statement early Friday saying there were no survivors. It released a list of passengers that included nine Argentines, seven Mexicans, three Dutch citizens, two Germans, two Austrians, a French citizen, an Italian, a Spaniard, a Venezuelan and a Japanese.

A photo posted on the website of the local newspaper, Escambray, showed a large piece of the plane in flames, with rescue workers in olive-green military uniforms standing around it. It said the local Communist Party chief as well as Interior Ministry and other officials were at the scene helping with the effort.

The twice-a-week flight goes from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to Santiago de Cuba to Havana. It reported an emergency at 5:42 p.m. and subsequently lost contact with air traffic controllers.

State media said that the plane was an ATR-72 twin turboprop and that the crash site was not far from the Zaza reservoir, the largest in Cuba. It said authorities had mobilized doctors and emergency workers in the rural area, which is about 220 miles (350 kilometers) east of Havana.

At Havana's national terminal, relatives of those on board the plane were kept isolated from other passengers and journalists.

"This is very sad," Caridad de las Mercedes Gonzalez, who was manning an airport information desk, said before officials announced that everyone had been killed. "We are very worried. This has taken us by surprise."

State media gave no details on what happened to the airliner, saying only that the cause of the crash was being investigated.

The flight would have been one of the last leaving Santiago de Cuba for Havana ahead of Tropical Storm Tomas, which was on a track to pass between Cuba's eastern end and the western coast of Haiti on Friday.

Cuban media said earlier that flights and train service to Santiago were being suspended until the storm passed.

AeroCaribbean is owned by Cuban state airline Cubana de Aviacion.

The last passenger plane crash on the island occurred in March 2002, when a Soviet-made biplane carrying 16 people - including 12 foreigners - plunged into a small reservoir in central Cuba. The plane was operated by a small local charter company called Aerotaxi.