JAKARTA - RESCUERS pulled dozens of corpses from villages devastated by landslides in western Indonesia, many digging through mud with their bare hands on Thursday as they were lashed by rain.

Blocked roads hampered efforts to get heavy-lifting equipment to the remote area.

Officials said 36 corpses had been recovered and that 42 other people were buried and feared dead.

Most of the victims were killed in a single village in Karanganyar district Wednesday, hours after they finished clearing the mud from an earlier, smaller landslide.

'I am searching for my cousin and my sister who are still buried beneath the mud,' said Wiryo Hamidi as he dug through the remains of his village. 'I hope we can find them today so I can bury them.'

Villages, police and soldiers uncovered two more corpses in Karanganyar on Thursday morning, one of them a young child, said Heru Aji Pratomo, the head of the local disaster coordinating agency.

'Everyone is working hard, we have good spirits,' he told el-Shinta radio station.

Mr Heru said rescuers were using high-powered hoses to wash away at the mud, but blocked roads and the remote location of the landslides meant mechanical diggers and backhoes had yet to arrive.

Thirty-six corpses had been recovered so far in Karanganyar, he said, with at least 30 other people buried and feared dead there.

Other officials - who said there were a dozen other victims elsewhere in the region - have given slightly different tolls.

Seasonal rains and high tides in recent days have caused widespread flooding across much of Indonesia, the world's fourth most-populous nation. Millions of people live in mountainous regions and near fertile flood plains that are close to rivers.

The latest disasters occurred on the third anniversary of a massive earthquake off Sumatra in Dec 2004 that triggered a tsunami. That killed more than 230,000 people and left a half-million homeless in a dozen countries. -- AP