People check their damaged house following a 5.6-magnitude earthquake that killed at least 268 people, with hundreds injured and others missing in Cianjur, Indonesia on November 22, 2022. Photo: AFP

The death toll from an earthquake on Indonesia's main island of Java jumped to 268 on Tuesday, as rescuers searched for survivors in the rubble and relatives started to bury their loved ones.

As bodybags emerged from crumpled buildings in Indonesia's most populous province, rescue efforts turned to any survivors still under debris in areas made hard to reach by the mass of obstacles thrown onto the roads by the quake.

The epicenter of the shallow 5.6-magnitude quake on Monday was near the town Cianjur in West Java where most of the victims were killed as buildings collapsed and landslides were triggered.

One of the dozens of rescuers, 34-year-old Dimas Reviansyah, said teams were using chainsaws and excavators to break through piles of felled trees and debris to reach areas where civilians were believed trapped.

Drone footage taken by AFP showed the extent of a quake-triggered landslide where a wall of brown earth is only punctuated by workers using heavy machinery to clear a road.

President Joko Widodo visited the area on Tuesday, offering compensation for victims and ordering disaster and rescue agencies to "mobilize their personnel" to prioritize the evacuation of victims.

"On behalf of myself, on behalf of the government, I would like to express my deepest condolences," he said.

Indonesia's national disaster mitigation agency, or BNPB, said at least 25 people were still buried under the rubble in Cianjur as darkness fell Monday. 

"There's a possibility there are still more victims," Rudy Saladin, a local military chief, told AFP.

The BNPB offered a lower death toll of 103 as of Tuesday morning and said 31 people remain missing.

Some of the dead were students at an Islamic boarding school while others were killed in their homes when roofs and walls caved in on them.

"The room collapsed and my legs were buried under the rubble. It all happened so fast," 14-year-old student Aprizal Mulyadi told AFP.

The search operation on Tuesday was made more challenging because of severed road links and power outages in parts of the largely rural, mountainous region.

By Tuesday morning, 89 percent of power to Cianjur had been recovered by state-owned electricity company PLN, according to state news agency Antara.

AFP