GENEVA, Dec 29: The death toll in the tidal wave disaster around the Indian Ocean could rise above 100,000 once outlying islands of India are fully checked, a senior international Red Cross official said on Wednesday.

"I would not be at all surprised if we are over 100,000 dead, particularly when we see what has happened in the Andaman and Nicobar islands," Peter Rees, head of operations support at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, told journalists.

Rees's evaluation came as the Federation raised its initial emergency appeal for funding to 67 million Swiss francs (59 million) to help two million people across 10 countries.

"The scale of this disaster is growing by the hour. The devastation is unimaginable," Markku Niskala, secretary general of the Federation, said in a statement. The confirmed death toll totted up by the agency from official sources had reached 68,826 at 1005 GMT (0305pm PST) on Wednesday.

Some 508,530 people were injured and more than one million displaced, while 161,200 people were officially estimated as homeless, Federation officials added. About 1,450 people were reported by authorities to be missing in Thailand and Somalia, but Rees warned that the overall figure was likely to far higher once full assessments were made in all countries.

Officials at the Federation and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said coordination among aid agencies was working well. But they revealed that airports at the Sri Lankan capital Colombo and in Jakarta were being clogged up with unsolicited aid, hampering organised relief.

"We're already having reports that in both Jakarta and Colombo, we're getting overwhelmed with unsolicited relief supplies. We're moving our goods for Indonesia into Medan (north Sumatra) because of the backlog at Jakarta," Rees said.

"I think it is mostly going to be from the very large number of governments and organisations sending goods," Rees said. The "confused situation" was likely to last for couple of weeks and was predictable because of the unprecedented scale of the relief effort, officials said.

"We will work with OCHA (the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) in particular to try to bring the whole international community into line with a coordinated response, but it's going to be messy," Rees said. -AFP