KHAO LAK, Dec 30: The Indian Ocean tsunami killed at least 2,230 foreigners in Thailand, most of them in the devastated Khao Lak resort and on other southern beaches, officials said on Thursday.
The latest death toll was issued as foreign forensic teams began the gruesome task of identifying victims, a job made all the more daunting by the sheer number of bodies piling up in morgues.
The rising toll will add to the misery of anxious relatives of tourists, many of them Europeans who had traded a cold, dark winter for the warmth of Thailand's Andaman Sea shores.
The figures showed that Khao Lak, once lined with luxury hotels but now a scene of smashed buildings, wrecked cars and rescuers retrieving corpses, was Thailand's worst-hit area.
German, Swiss, Dutch, Australian and other forensic teams were helping identify the bodies. "It will be challenging," said Karl Kent, head of a 17-member Australian Federal Police team. "The scale is of a magnitude that Australia and other countries have not experienced," he said.
TROPICAL HEAT: While the Thais wanted to bury bodies decomposing fast in the tropical heat and piling up quickly, diplomats insisted that no unidentified body should be buried.
The diplomats won the argument, with Thai Deputy Health Minister Suchai Charoenratanakul backing them. The death toll across Asia from Sunday's Indian Ocean tsunami, triggered by a huge earthquake off Indonesia, has soared to more than 120,000.
Some governments, especially Sweden which said it feared more than 1,000 Swedes may have been killed, are under pressure to find out just how many of their people are among the 6,130 that Thailand says are still missing. -Reuters
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