Echoes of 9/11 as friends and relatives look for loved ones

Pictures of Thai families posing stiffly for a formal photo, smiling tourists basking in the sun and photos of battered corpses flutter from notice boards at Phuket’s city hall - they are the missing and the dead from Sunday’s devastating tsunamis.

In scenes reminiscent of the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in New York, anxious friends and relatives are converging on city hall - a makeshift diplomatic enclave and relief centre on the Thai island of Phuket where nations have set up temporary embassies on fold-up tables.