Indonesia has borne the brunt of last Sunday’s catastrophe, with a health ministry official putting the country’s dead at 79,940 with entire coastal villages disappearing under the wall of water.

The health ministry cautioned that there could be 100,000 deaths in Aceh and north Sumatra.

UN emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland said,” What we see is that the figures may be approaching 150,000 dead. The vast majority of those are in Indonesia and Aceh, which is the least assessed area because of logistical constraints.

He said, “We will never ever have the absolute, definite figure because there are many nameless fishermen and villages that have just gone, and we have no chance of finding out how many they were.”

In Sri Lanka, 29,729 were confirmed killed by the tidal waves, while more than 16,000 people were injured, the president’s office said.

The number of people missing was revised down from nearly 14,000 yesterday to 5,240 today, but there was no immediate explanation for this.

The death toll in India hit 12,829, although this includes 3,874 people the government says are missing and presumed dead.

In Myanmar, at least 90 persons were killed, according to the UN, but the real toll was expected to be far higher. At least 75 persons were killed and another 42 confirmed missing in the tourist paradise of the Maldives, President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom said.

Sixtysix persons were dead in Malaysia, most of them in Penang, the police said.

In Bangladesh a father and child were killed after a tourist boat capsized, officials said.

Fatalities also occurred on the east coast of Africa where 132 persons were declared dead in Somalia, 10 in Tanzania and one in Kenya.

PHUKET: Elephants were joining the huge effort to clean up Thailand’s southern coastline and recover bodies on Sunday as the country’s death toll climbed close to 5,000 a week after the tsunami disaster.

With more than 6,000 still listed as missing, the official death toll could be as high as 8,000, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has warned.

While tourists on the resort island of Phuket were returning to some of the beaches untouched by the devastation, rescuers and forensic teams were focusing on the region around Khao Lak beach, about 80 km north of Phuket, where plush resorts were flattened by the waves.

SYDNEY: The official toll of Australians confirmed killed in the Boxing Day tsunami disaster was raised on Sunday to 12, with grave fears for another 107, but the government says the figure will rise significantly.

The foreign affairs department says it has not accounted for another 950 Australians believed to have been in the areas affected by the tsunamis, around 700 in the Phuket region of southern Thailand with about 140 others in Sri Lanka.

SINGAPORE: Two Singaporeans listed as missing in the tsunami-ravaged Indonesian province of Aceh have been confirmed dead, raising the city-state’s death toll from the disaster to nine, the government has said. In a statement late on Saturday night the government said 157 nationals were still unaccounted for.

TOKYO: At least 20 Japanese have been killed in the tsunami disaster, the foreign ministry said on Sunday after two more bodies were identified in Thailand.

The two bodies, which had been recovered in Krabi near the Thai resort of Phuket, were confirmed to be those of a Japanese woman in her 50s and her son, a ministry official said.

SEOUL: South Korea on Sunday confirmed that 10 of its nationals were dead while 10 others were missing in the tsunami disaster.

The Foreign Ministry said in a new casualty report that 10 South Koreans were killed and eight were missing in Thailand and two in Indonesia.