Indian quake death toll moves towards 12,000

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.

Most of the victims whose fate remained unknown were on the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal, which were hit by seven aftershocks of 4.4 to 5.5 magnitude overnight.

“Unless we go into the interiors, we will not be able to have a clear death figure. The estimated missing/dead is 8,000, but we have recovered very few bodies,” said AN Vasudev Rao, the deputy inspector-general of police, in the territory’s capital Port Blair.

“Rescuers are yet to move into the interior, and some of the villagers have already buried their dead, so we are only going by an estimated figure,” he said.

The Home Ministry in New Delhi said the confirmed death toll in India stood at 4,413 today, including 90 on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and 3,618 in Tamil Nadu, the worst affected state.

The Andaman and Nicobar region is made up of more than 500 islands, but about 30 are inhabited.

Located 915 miles east of the Indian mainland, the islands were the site of a notorious penal colony used to imprison Indian independence leaders during British colonial times.

Rao, the police chief, said that all the inhabited islands were hit by Sunday’s tsunamis.

“We have been unable to reach two of them with a population of up to 1,000 each because of rough sea,” Rao said.

The missing included 200 air force personnel stationed there.

Meanwhile, authorities rushed drinking water and medicines and tried to improve sanitary conditions for thousands of survivors living in relief camps dotting India’s southern coast.

The air force and coast guard used planes, helicopters and ships to deliver food and generators to ruined coastal areas.

In the worst hit district of Nagappattinam in Tamil Nadu state, some bodies still rotted in the mud left behind by the tidal waves.