JAKARTA - THREE people have been killed and nearly 90,000 forced to evacuate their homes in the Indonesian capital due to heavy floods, officials said on Saturday.

The health ministry said 88,261 people had abandoned flooded homes in Jakarta, where heavy rain also forced the international airport to close for about six hours on Friday.

'A three-year-old boy and a 21-year-old man drowned yesterday (Friday). Another woman, 50, was also killed but we don't know what the cause is,' an officer from the national disaster management centre Setyo said.

Indonesia's capital was cleaning up after several days of torrential rain engulfed parts of the city with up to 1.5 metres of water, a health official said.

The rains, which also caused serious travel chaos and closed the capital's main airport for several hours, had stopped in Jakarta on Saturday but some areas of the city remained under water.

'We can confirm three people were killed in West Jakarta after being washed away by the current,' Mr Rustam Pakaya, head of the health ministry's crisis centre, said by telephone.

Pakaya said that 6,820 people were still in shelters across Jakarta, a city of 14 million that is regularly hit by floods at this time of year.

Jakarta's main airport had briefly been forced to shut on Friday, after rain and fog slashed visibility to less than 300 metres, delaying more than 40 flights.

'It is back to normal, some delayed flights from yesterday have already departed,' Mr Hariyanto, an official at Soekarno-Hatta airport, said.

The main airport toll road was still partly closed, he added.

Floods and landslides also hit other parts of Java Island, as well as Sulawesi Island and Sumatra Island this week, killing at least 12 people, but the situation had improved in most areas, Mr Pakaya said. -- REUTERS

Is this article useful to you?