Scores die as volcano erupts

• Villagers pray at the burial of a victim of the Mount Merapi eruption at Umbulhardjo village in Sleman, near the ancient city of Yogyakarta Reuters

Scores of bodies found yesterday raised the death toll to 122.

The injured - with clothes, blankets and even mattresses fused to their skin by the 750C heat - were carried away on stretchers following the first big explosion just before midnight.

All yesterday, Merapi shot towering plumes of ash that dusted the windscreens of cars 300 miles away. Bursts of hot clouds occasionally interrupted aid efforts, with rescuers screaming "Watch out! Hot cloud!"

The intensifying eruptions have baffled scientists who have monitored the mountain for years and left them uncertain what to expect. Dozens of explosions that followed Merapi's initial blast on October 26 had been predicted to ease pressure behind a magma dome.

The danger zone where residents have been ordered to flee has now been expanded to 12 miles from the crater.

Yesterday's explosion - said by volcanologists to be the biggest since the 1870s - hit hardest in Bronggang, a village nine miles from the crater. Soldiers joined the rescue operations, pulling at least 78 bodies from homes and streets blanketed by ash up to one foot deep.

Crumpled roofs, charred carcasses of cattle and broken chairs - all layered in white soot - dotted the smouldering landscape.

The volcano, in the heart of densely populated Java island, has erupted scores of times in the past, killing more than 1,500 people in the last century alone. But tens of thousands of people live on its rolling slopes, drawn to soil made fertile by lava and volcanic debris.

"The heat surrounded us and there was white smoke everywhere," said Niti Raharjo, 47, who was thrown from his motorbike along with his 19-year-old son while trying to flee.

"I saw people running, screaming in the dark, women so scared they fell unconscious," he said from a hospital where they were both being treated for burns.

"There was an explosion that sounded like it was from a war. And it got worse, the ash and debris raining down."

The greatest danger posed by Merapi has always been pyroclastic flows - like those that roared down the southern slopes at speeds of up to 60mph.

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

More than 150 injured people - with burns, respiratory problems, broken bones and cuts -- waited to be treated at the tiny Sardjito hospital, where the bodies piled up in the morgue, and two other hospitals.

"We're totally overwhelmed here," said Heru Nogroho, a spokesman at Sardjito.

In terms of the amount of volcanic material released - 1,765 million cubic feet - "it was the biggest in at least a century," Gede Swantika, a state volcanologist, said.

More than 100,000 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.

They were told to stay away yesterday. The government also announced an $11 million programme to buy the cows on the mountain to keep farmers off its slopes, and to provide compensation for animals lost in the eruptions.

Even scientists from Merapi's monitoring station were told they had to pack up and move down the mountain.

Before yesterday's eruption, the death toll from Merapi stood at 44, with most dying in its first blast on 26 October. With the new deaths around Bronggang it climbed to 122, the National Disaster Management Agency said.

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.