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Some 70 people were feared to have drowned after an overloaded boat carrying more than 200 passengers sank in eastern Indonesia, officials said Monday.

The Masohi Star went down about 8:15 pm (1115 GMT) Sunday after travelling just 500 metres (1,650 feet) from the shore of Ambon island, said Lieutenant Colonel Marten Luther Djari, an adviser to the provincial governor.

Five bodies have been recovered so far but at least 65 people are still missing, presumed dead.

Djari said police were questioning the skipper of the boat, which was reportedly returning to port to reduce its load when it went down.

Hospital and government officials said the boat was carrying 200 to 300 passengers, 130 of whom survived and have been treated at Ambon hospitals.

Passengers who could swim were rescued but the rest have probably died, said Amin Kaliwawa, an officer at the police operations centre.

"Those still missing are presumed dead," Kaliwawa told AFP.

Although the Masohi Star is believed to have sunk 150 metres to the bottom of the bay, military vessels and private speedboats continued to search the area Monday evening, Kaliwawa said.

Local officials set up a reporting centre for people whose relatives have not been found. As of late morning Monday it had received 65 reports from people whose relatives are missing, said Djari.

"Until now, five people have been found dead," he said.

"We have received five bodies and treated more than 116 people since last night," Mien Marasabessy, a member of staff at the Al-Fatah hospital in Ambon, told AFP.

Another 10 people were taken to the Latumeten military hospital, said Jaffar, a soldier on duty there.

"A total of 130 people were saved last night but we fear that a lot more passengers are missing," Jaffar told AFP.

Djari called the tragedy "a pure accident" but could not say what caused it.

Some passengers said the vessel was overcrowded. The state news agency Antara quoted witnesses as saying the boat sank after the captain tried to return to Ambon's Slamet Riyadi port to drop off some passengers and cargo.

Djari said the Masohi Star had a capacity of 180 passengers. Although 104 people bought tickets and boarded the vessel, preliminary counting indicated about 200 people were aboard, Djari said.

Officials were still trying to confirm the actual number of passengers.

"There were too many passengers. Before the boat went down the water was already up to the windows," Hadijah Wael, one of the survivors, was quoted as saying by the Republika newspaper.

Most of the dead were children and elderly people who could not swim, Al-Fatah hospital's Marasabessy said, adding that all 116 people had been discharged from the hospital.

The boat was travelling to Masohi on neighbouring Seram island.

Boating tragedies are relatively frequent in Indonesia where ferries are a common way of travelling among the thousands of islands in the archipelago.

Earlier this year 20 people drowned when a passenger boat exploded off southern Sulawesi island.

In 2000 about 500 people, most of them fleeing sectarian violence in the Maluku islands of which Ambon is part, died when their overloaded boat disappeared on its way to Manado in northern Sulawesi.

The latest accident is not connected with Muslim-Christian violence in the region which has claimed thousands of lives since 1999.

Calm has returned to most of the Malukus, though sporadic incidents of violence still occur. The islands remain under a state of civil emergency administered by the governor.

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