‘Many more dead people in many places’

THE body-searchers of Banda Aceh are running out of time. In six days it will be the one month anniversary of the tsunami which devastated the northern Indonesian city and it is also when, the government said yesterday, it would call a halt to the search for remains.

This is despite the discovery of significant numbers of bodies every day since the disaster. The last confirmed daily tally was for Tuesday this week when 1,481 new corpses were retrieved and buried across Aceh province, the vast majority in Banda Aceh.

So far 91,313 people have been lifted from the streets, dragged from rivers or pulled from debris, but the most conservative estimate of numbers killed stands at 116,000 - leaving over 25,000 unaccounted for.