Surabaya – Masudi Muali said he ran as fast as he could after seeing many of his friends beheaded by indigeneous Dayak tribesmen outside his college in Sampit on the Indonesian part of Borneo island.

"I jumped into a river as they threw spears at me. I'm thankful to be alive," said the weary-looking Muali, 27.

Muali said he and 26 of his friends were dragged out of Sampit's Miftahul Ulum Islamic boarding school by the Dayaks, who were armed with traditional mandau swords and spears, and told to stand in line.

"They told us that if we didn't resist we wouldn't be killed," he said, speaking in Tanjung Perak port in the East Java city of Surabaya after disembarking from a refugee-packed ferry evacuating him him from Sampit.

But a few metres from the school, the Dayaks hacked his schoolmates to death one by one, and chopped their heads off, he said. "Some of us managed to slip through their fingers and run off. I don't know if they were caught again," he said.

Muali is one of thousands of refugees who fled the savage attacks on settlers from Madura island by gangs of Dayaks in Sampit, a small industrial city in Central Kalimantan province. A seven-year-old boy, who arrived in Surabaya with his mother, had fingers cut off both hands by the Dayaks.

Thousands of Madurese settlers are still sheltered at government offices in Sampit, scared and hungry, their numbers swollen by more than 10,000 new arrivals Monday as people filtered out of the jungles where they had been hiding.

When the first refugee-crammed navy landing craft arrived in Surabaya on Sunday, reporters there said many were crying "water, please give us water," from the decks.

Officials said 270 people have been confirmed killed in the massacres in and around Sampit, which involved decapitations and instances of cannibalism, according to local reporters.

Locals scoff at the official total, saying no one had yet counted the decomposing beheaded corpses in the streets of Sampit and the surrounding villages.

The Sampit violence has spread to nearby areas, including the provincial capital of Palangkaraya, 220 kilometres northeast, where armed Dayaks rampaged unchecked Monday.

In Palangkaraya though most Madurese had already fled, and the Dayaks, armed with swords and axes, looted, burned and vandalized houses and shops abandoned by their occupants. They have vowed to rid the province of the Madurese.