A torrent of mud slammed into dozens of homes in Sijeruk village, 370 kilometers (230 miles) east of Jakarta, in the second disaster to hit Java island this week caused by monsoon rains and, activists charged, deforestation.
"We suspect there are about 200 people in 120 houses buried in the mud," local chief of police operations Budi said, adding that about 150 police and soldiers were involved in rescue operations.
A district welfare official, Umar Yulianto, said that the toll stood at 16.
He said that about 570 people lived in the area, with one section where about 170 people live unaffected. He did not say how many people had been accounted for. Local television said that some 300 people were thought missing.
The landslide slammed into houses at about 5:00 am (2200 GMT Tuesday) after three days of monsoon rains.
Television footage showed workers using two excavators and hand tools to dig into the mound in the hope of finding survivors. Only the tops of tiled roofs of some houses were visible, along with smashed timber debris and other semi-flattened brick and concrete homes.
Rescue worker Dedi Suromli said that the search was called off due to bad weather and would resume early on Thursday.
"It is raining and foggy and it's not safe to continue the search," he said, adding that 95 people were thought to remain under the sludge.
He said that the landslide covered about six hectares (15 acres) and the mud was as deep as five meters (yards).
Banjar Negara deputy police chief Gusti Indra Cahyadi told the online Detikcom news agency that the road leading to the village was damaged, hampering efforts to bring in heavier rescue equipment.
He said that the area was prone to landslides during the rainy season but that in the past only 10 houses had been affected at most.
The landslide came as rescuers continued to sift through debris and mud in the aftermath of flash floods in East Java province that have killed at least 57 people and left thousands homeless.
"The evacuation of bodies is still continuing. Twenty bodies are still at the scene but they have been included in the tally," Teduh Tedjo, who is coordinating police rescue efforts, said by telephone from Jember.
Misdarno, from the disaster coordinating center in East Java's capital Surabaya, said that the death toll was still at 57 but added that 17 more people were listed as missing.
Four villages in Jember district, 800 kilometers east of the capital, were affected. About 5,000 refugees sheltered in mosques, schools and other government buildings as 400 police and troops built emergency bridges and ferried medical aid, food and water to survivors.
Environmentalists blamed both disasters on rampant illegal logging as well as land conversion for farming on Java, one of the world's most densely populated islands, as they called on the government to take action.
"We can look forward to another disaster if they don't stop [deforestation] and if they don't reforest areas with original species to make new natural forests," Greenpeace Southeast Asia forestry campaigner Hapsoro said.
"This is a sign for the Indonesian government to be more serious."
More than 140 Indonesians were killed in February last year when a garbage slide buried more than 60 houses in a village southwest of Jakarta after days of heavy rains.
In 2003 more than 200 lives were claimed when flash floods tore through Bahorok, a popular riverside resort in North Sumatra. Some officials denied that deforestation was the cause of that tragedy.
© 2005 Agence France-Presse
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