The last few dozen remaining members of an ancient indigenous tribe in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands said they raced up a mountain to escape a devastating tsunami – and avoid extinction.

Bodies are still hanging from trees and floating in water in wiped-out villages in Car Nicobar island, but the horrors of the tsunami have not shaken the Nicobarese tribe.

THE Indian government yesterday halted the mass evacuation of island survivors whose homes were smashed by tsunamis, focusing instead on bringing relief directly to the victims as demanded by aid groups.

Rescuers were today ready to give up hope of finding more survivors in Indonesia’s shattered Sumatra island, one week after tsunamis wrought death and destruction on a massive scale across Asia.

Six aftershocks jolted a remote southern Indian archipelago where villagers were fighting today to survive without water or food after Asia’s devastating tsunami.

The huge world relief drive to shelter, treat and feed millions of survivors of the Indian Ocean tsunamis finally kicked in today as the death toll passed 121,000 and was still climbing.

For G Balan, a gut-wrenching obstacle stood between his tsunami-devastated Indian island village and any hope of safety: A lagoon teeming with crocodiles.

Without water or food for six days after a tsunami, villagers on a remote southern archipelago are starving and desperate for relief to reach them, survivors and officials said today.

Even as the people of the isolated Andaman and Nicobar islands told harrowing tales of fending off starvation and hungry crocodiles thrown ashore by the towering tsunami, they vowed today to go back to their tiny islands and start all over again.

Rescuers followed the stench of death to find rotting bodies in jungles on India’s remote Andaman and Nicobar islands, where thousands are believed to have died, while people fled their homes today amid warnings of possible new tsunamis following fresh quakes.

ABOUT 1,000 people died when tidal waves crashed over an isolated island in India’s Andaman chain where many thousands more are feared to have died, a coastguard official said.

RESCUE workers pulled corpses from canals and water-logged fields in India yesterday as the government warned the death toll of almost 9,400 from a tsunami that lashed the country’s south would rise further.

An Indian archipelago was jolted by aftershocks from the massive weekend quake today, as emergency aid reached survivors of the tsunamis that killed 4,413 people and left 8,000 missing -many of them probably dead.

A string of Indian islands were rattled by aftershocks today while emergency aid was rushed to survivors of the tsunami waves that killed at least 4,300 people along the nation’s south-eastern coast.