Parents and rescuers in Indonesia were desperately searching for dozens of teenage boys believed to be trapped, a day after the collapse of an Islamic boarding school which has already left three dead, authorities said.

Axar.az reports, citing Guardian, authorities said 91 people were listed as missing after the Al Khoziny school building collapsed while pupils held late afternoon prayers in a mosque housed on a lower floor of a building whose upper floors were under construction.

The boarding school is in the East Java town of Sidoarjo, about 780 km east of Jakarta.

By late evening on Tuesday, three bodies had been recovered, with those missing still trapped under huge slabs of concrete. Ninety-nine children and workers at the school were accounted for.

The head of the local rescue agency, Nanang Sigit, told reporters that rescuers had detected signs of life beneath the debris