25,000 feared dead on Sumatra

They struggled to bury the dead and desperate residents looted shops on Indonesia’s Sumatra Island today, where the earthquake and tsunamis killed up to 25,000 people, according to government estimates.

As medicine and other emergency supplies began arriving in the island’s worst-hit province of Aceh, scores of corpses lay uncollected on the streets, triggering fears of an outbreak of disease.

“There is no help, it is each person for themselves here,” said district official Tengku Zulkarnain in the town of Meulaboh on the island’s devastated western coast.

The official death toll stood at 5,000, but Vice President Yusuf Kalla as saying he predicted that up to 25,000 may have died and another 100,000 injured.

Purnomo Sidik, national disaster director at the Social Affairs Ministry, said Kalla’s prediction was in line with his ministry’s estimates.

“Thousands of victims cannot be reached in some isolated and remote areas that cannot be contacted due to lack of communication,” he said.

Sunday’s quake – the most powerful in the last 40 years – struck off Aceh’s west coast, sending tsunamis crashing onto its shores and coastlines in Asia and Africa, killing at least 23,000 people.

Rescue teams have yet to visit large parts of Aceh, especially along its western coast. Initial reports say that miles of villages along the coast were swept away. Meulaboh has been razed, said residents.

“People are looting but not because they are evil, but they are hungry,” said Red Cross official Irman Rachmat in the provincial capital, Banda Aceh. “We don’t have enough people to bury the dead. We are worried that all the corpses on the streets will lead to disease.”

The military said it had sent three planes of emergency supplies to Aceh. The United Nations in Jakarta said 175 tons of rice arrived in the province last night, and that it expected to fly in medical supplies Thursday.

The quake and tsunami has devastated much of the province’s infrastructure, and distribution of supplies to its 4.3 million people will be difficult, foreign aid workers warned.

“We have not been provided any drinking water or medicine,” said Aminah, one of 3,000 refugees living in tents in the northern Aceh city of Lhokseumawe.

Aceh has been wracked by a separatist war for the past 26 years, and Jakarta had banned foreign journalists and international aid agency representatives from visiting the region. But the government yesterday lifted the ban, and said it would welcome aid.