More than 30,000 Indian villagers were reported missing this evening more than 24 hours after their homes on a remote archipelago were swept away by yesterday's tsunami.

As the confirmed death toll from the disaster climbed past 23,000 in nine countries from Indonesia to Somalia, rescue workers scoured the fatal shores of South Asia for corpses and rushed to bury the dead before disease could take hold.

The world's biggest earthquake for 40 years was set of by the slight shifting of a massive tectonic plate that ripped open the sea bed off the Indonesian island of Sumatra and sent a 30ft (10m) tidal wave of death around the Indian Ocean basin.

Thirteen Britons were confirmed killed, although officials say that the toll is likely to rise further. The Foreign Office said 10 British died in Thailand and one holidaymaker in Sri Lanka. In the Maldives, a male holidaymaker suffered a heart attack moments before the devastating tidal wave struck and a woman also died.

Empty airliners were leaving Heathrow to pick tourists up from the debris of the quake, which measured 9.0 on the open-ended Richter scale, the most powerful since 1964.

Pat Faragher, from Wembley, north-west London, returned home from Sri Lanka in her bare feet. With her husband Bill at her side, she stood at Heathrow in her socks and said: "We have lost everything - no passports, no papers, all our belongings were swept away. But we're alive."

Sri Lanka was especially hard hit by the tsunami and rescue workers struggled to cope with the aftermath. A military spokesman said this morning that the official death toll had reached 10,029 and the Tamil Tiger rebels said at least 1,500 people - and possibly many more - were killed by the wall of water which swept in on areas under their control.

In India, where 6,600 people are confirmed dead, Hindus scattered flower petals at sea and sacrificed chickens to pray for the safe return of hundreds of pilgrims washed off southern beaches.

Helicopters rushed medicine to stricken areas along India's eastern coast. Among those who perished were a group of 200 Hindu pilgrims who had gone for a holy dip on a beach in Andhra Pradesh.

In India - as elsewhere - most of the victims were children and elderly people who were too weak to run or swim through the swirling waters. At a graveyard in southern Cuddalore, mass graves were dug using an excavating machine to bury nearly 200 bodies.

"We must have dug some seven or eight pits and buried 25, 30, 35 bodies in each of them," said gravedigger Shekhar. "We lined up bodies next to each other in two rows and buried them. I've never buried so many in a single day in my life."

Some 3,000 people were thought to have died in the Andaman and Nicobar islands, an isolated archipelago just a few hundred miles north of the epicentre. They included 100 staff on an Indian air force base that was washed away by the tsunami.

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