1,000 passengers feared dead as wave engulfs train

The massive tidal waves that slammed into Sri Lanka flung a train off its tracks leaving its 1,000 passengers dead or missing, police said today.

Rescuers uncovered thousands of more bodies across the country, bringing the island nation’s toll to 18,706. Officials said the final toll may reach 25,000.

About 150 bodies were recovered from the train’s eight carriages, which were little more than twisted metal, and cremated or buried today next to the railroad track that runs along the coastline, regional police chief BTB Ariyapala said.

The train had been travelling from the capital Colombo to the city of Galle, on the southern tip of the island, on Sunday when it was hit by the killer waves.

Meanwhile, in Muslim villages in the east of the otherwise Buddhist-dominated island, solemn survivors started to bury the bloated and decomposing bodies.

Some, lacking shovels, used big iron forks used for community cooking and their hands to scrape a final resting place for several dozen victims, half of them children.

In Galle – one of the worst-affected areas of the hardest-hit Asian nation - officials used a loudspeaker on a fire engine to advise residents to lay the bodies of the dead on roads for collection and burial.

Sri Lanka’s official death toll stood at 18,706 today, up 3,706 from a few hours earlier, said Nimal Hettiarchchi, director of the National Disaster Management Centre.

“The toll is going up and I will not be surprised it reaches 20,000 to 25,000,” he said in Colombo.

“Bodies are showing up in many places.”

The toll included 2,000 bodies recovered in northern areas controlled by the country’s Tamil Tiger rebels, the guerrillas said. A million people have been displaced in massive flooding unleashed by the earthquake off the coast of Indonesia.

The tidal waves and flooding have uprooted land mines in the war-torn country, threatening to kill or maim aid workers and survivors who are attempting to return to what’s left of their homes.

“Land mines are posing a new risk to Sri Lankans, and to relief efforts,” said Ted Chaiban, the Sri Lanka chief of UNICEF.

“Mines were floated by the floods and washed out of known mine fields, so now we don’t know where they are, and the warning signs … have been swept away or destroyed.”

The health ministry said it was dispatching 500 doctors by helicopter to the affected area to treat the wounded and to ensure medical care in case of waterborne diseases such as diarrhoea.

“We are asking for more to come on voluntary basis,” said Anuruddha Padeniya, secretary of a medical association.

Police said they were waiving a law requiring autopsies of the victims to speed up the burial of decomposing bodies.

“We accept that the deaths were caused by drowning,” police spokesman Rienzie Perera said.