Earthquake death toll passes 8,600

Japan’s police agency says more than 8,600 people are dead and 12,800 are listed as missing after last week’s earthquake and tsunami.

A week and a half after the disasters devastated the north east coast, the National Police Agency said that the number of bodies collected so far stood at 8,649, while 12,877 people were listed as missing.

The death toll is steadily rising as searchers find bodies in the wasteland left behind by the powerful quake and the massive tsunami it unleashed. The tsunami is likely to have swept many bodies out to sea, as it did in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, when many of the dead were never found.

The tallies of dead and missing are likely to overlap. Many of the bodies collected so far have not yet been identified, police say, so it is likely many of the unidentified bodies will match names on the missing list once their identities are confirmed.