Fears grow for 'more than 1,000 missing'

More than a thousand people could still be missing after Indonesia's devastating quake-tsunami, officials said yesterday, drastically upping the number of people unaccounted for a week after the disaster.

Palu city on Sulawesi island has been left in ruins after it was hit by a powerful quake and a wall of water which razed whole neighbourhoods to the ground, with the official death toll now 1,571.

The number of confirmed missing stands at over 100, but fears are growing that vast numbers of people have been buried in a massive government housing complex at Balaroa, where the sheer force of the quake turned the earth temporarily to mush.

"Maybe more than 1,000 people are still missing," Yusuf Latif, a spokesman for Indonesia's search and rescue agency, told AFP.

After days of delays, international aid is slowly making its way to the disaster zone, where the UN says almost 200,000 people need humanitarian assistance.

Authorities previously set a deadline of Friday for finding anyone trapped under ruined buildings, although chances of pulling survivors alive from the rubble at such a late stage are almost zero.