The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has implored countries to take DNA samples before burying victims in mass graves. But although local officials want to oblige, they do not have the trained staff, technology or time.

The international forensic science task force drawn from a dozen countries still does not know how many bodies it is looking for. Whitehall says that it cannot even guess at the number of Britons unaccounted for. There is also a big discrepancy between the Foreign Office total of dead and figures given by governments sure that the final British death toll will be much higher.

One British official in Phuket said last night: “Only when we have a positive identification from a family member or close friend who is here, and the next of kin have been informed back home, do we confirm a death. Thousands contacted the emergency line in the first hours to tell us of loved ones missing, but a lot may have turned up and their families haven’t updated us, so these lists are totally unreliable.”

Local rescue teams have no idea how many of 3,000 Western tourists still unaccounted for in Thailand were swept out to sea, or whether their remains have been buried or cremated without the authorities being informed.

Bodies found now, six days after the tsunami, are unrecognisable. More British forensic science experts are being sent to join the nine police working in Sri Lanka and Thailand as pressure grows from local authorities to bury corpses.

British police joined those in Phuket packing bodies in dry ice yesterday. Working around the clock, the British officers fingerprint the dead and take hair and tissue samples. Next of kin have been asked to provide dental records and their own DNA.

Those charged with dealing with the dead say that they have only another day at the most before deciding what to do with the mounting numbers of Western victims. Across Asia a plea has gone out for refrigerated lorries that can be used as mortuaries, giving experts extra time to establish identities.

A Foreign Office official said: “I’m afraid some families will never know for sure what became of their loved one.”

There are no plans to send an aircraft to collect probable British victims so that they can be identified at laboratories in Britain. The best that some authorities can manage is to post photographs or names on bulletin boards but with so many misspelt names and mixed-up nationalities, anxious British families have been urged to wait for Foreign Office confirmation. There is little hope of finding survivors but Thai ministers say they will not give up searching.

The forensic squads are concentrating efforts on a 20-mile stretch of beach in Phang Nga province, north of Phuket, where Bhokin Balakula, the Interior Minister, said that 3,500 bodies — most of Westerners — had been recovered.

Girl’s sea warning saved a hundred

A GIRL aged ten saved a hundred fellow tourists from the tsunami because of a geography lesson about the giant waves. Tilly Smith urged her family to get off Maikhao beach in Thailand after seeing the tide rush out and boats on the horizon begin to bob violently.

The youngster, recalling a recent school project on quakes, turned to her mother Penny and said: “Mummy, we must get off the beach now. I think there is going to be a tsunami.” Penny and her husband Colin alerted others and they cleared the Phuket beach just in time. It was one of the few beaches where no one has been reported killed or seriously injured.

Last night Tilly, from Oxshott, Surrey, told The Sun that credit for her quick-thinking should go to Andrew Kearney, her geography teacher at Danes Hill Preparatory School.

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