50,000 dead and thousands more bodies to find

The death toll from the killer waves unleashed across the Indian Ocean by the megaquake climbed inexorably toward 50,000 tonight.

Indonesia believes at least 25,000 people died on Sumatra island – 10,000 in one town alone – in what the UN says may be history’s most expensive disaster.

But insurance companies will not bear the brunt of the cost. Munich Re, the world’s biggest reinsurer, said the disaster will cost it less than £50 million.

“The insurance concentration is relatively thin, and the insured damage is likely to be contained,” it said.

The overall death toll doubled today and was expected to continue to rise as rescue teams reached coastal towns and villages cut by the tsunamis.

A dozen nations in a band of destruction from Southeast Asia to Africa tallied corpses at tropical beaches, devastated villages and choked hospital morgues .

Thousands of people were missing, including hundreds of foreign tourists in Thai resorts, and millions remained homeless.

Aid agencies feared malaria and cholera may add to the toll from Sunday’s massive quake-sparked waves, and mounted what UN officials said would be the world’s biggest relief effort.

“This is unprecedented,” said Yvette Stevens, an emergency relief co-ordinator of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

But help wasn’t arriving fast enough for Indonesia’s Sumatra island, where residents turned to looting to find food.

“There is no help, it is each person for themselves here,” district official Tengku Zulkarnain said.

Emergency workers who reached the northern tip of Sumatra island found that 10,000 people had been killed in a single town, Meulaboh, said Purnomo Sidik, national disaster director at the Social Affairs Ministry.

In Sri Lanka, the waves had flung a train off its tracks, killing 1,000 people, police said, as rescuers uncovered thousands of bodies, bringing the island nation’s toll to 18,706.

Sunday’s 9.0 magnitude megaquake under the Indian Ocean shot concussions of water onto coastlines from Indonesia to Somalia, drowning thousands. Almost a third of the dead were children, the UN children’s agency estimated.

Indonesia’s vice president estimated his country had as many as 25,000 victims, there were up to 12,000 in India and more than 1,500 in Thailand.

National elections were postponed indefinitely in the Maldives, an Indian Ocean archipelago where 55 were killed.

Desperate foreigners sought kin missing from holidays in Southeast Asia, where news of an unclaimed, blond 2-year-old boy brought dozens of hopeful parents to a hospital in Thailand’s resort island of Phuket. They all left disappointed - except for his Swedish uncle.

In Sri Lanka’s severely hit town of Galle, officials mounted a loudspeaker on a fire engine to advise residents to lay bodies on roads for collection. Elsewhere in Sri Lanka, residents used bare hands to scrape a final resting place for victims.

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

Indonesia’s Sumatra island was nearest the epicentre of Sunday’s monstrous quake – the world’s biggest in 40 years – and rescuers there battled to reach isolated coasts and dig into rubble of destroyed houses to seek survivors and retrieve the dead.

“We are working 24 hours to get out people out,” said Red Cross worker Tamin Faisil in Banda Aceh on Sumatra.

Red Cross official Irman Rachmat, also in Banda Aceh, said people on the island were in despair.

“People are looting, but not because they are evil, but they are hungry,” he said. “We don’t have enough people to bury the dead. We are worried that all the corpses on the streets will lead to disease.”

In once-thriving resorts of southern Thailand, volunteers dragged scores of corpses – including many foreign tourists – from beaches, inland pools and the debris of once-ritzy hotels.

Near Phang Nga province’s devastated Similan Beach and Spa Resort, where mostly German tourists were staying, a naked corpse hung suspended from a tree as if crucified.

Amid the devastation were some miraculous stories of survival.

In Malaysia, a 20-day-old baby was found alive on a floating mattress. She and her family were later reunited. A Hong Kong couple on holiday in Thailand clung to a floating mattress for six hours.

For others, the pain of their loss was almost impossible to come to terms with.

“Where are my children?” asked 41-year-old Absah, as she searched for her 11 youngsters in Banda Aceh. “Where are they? Why did this happen to me? I’ve lost everything.”

The disaster could be history’s costliest, with “many billions of dollars” of damage, said UN Under-secretary Jan Egeland, who is in charge of emergency relief coordination.

Millions face a hazardous future because of polluted drinking water and a lack of health services, he said.

Scores of people also were killed in Malaysia, Burma, and Bangladesh. The waves travelled as far as Somalia, with 100 dead, and Tanzania, with 10. A handful of deaths also were reported in Seychelles, Bangladesh and Kenya.

Officials in Thailand and Indonesia conceded that immediate public warnings of gigantic waves could have saved lives. The only known warning issued by Thai authorities reached resort operators when it was too late.

But governments insisted they couldn’t have known the true danger because there is no international system in place to track tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, and they could not afford the sophisticated equipment to build one.

For most people in the region, the only warning Sunday came when shallow coastal waters disappeared, sucked away by the approaching tsunami, before returning as a massive wall of water.

The waves wiped out villages, lifted cars and boats, yanked children from the arms of parents and swept away beachgoers, scuba divers and fishermen.