More than 19,000 people are known to have been killed on the island, the nearest land mass to the earthquake, but many parts have not yet been reached by rescue crews.

Jusuf Kalla, the Vice-President, said he believed that the numbers would keep rising. “We don’t have confirmed data, but I think between 21,000 and 25,000 people (have died),” he said shortly after returning from a visit to the regional capital, Banda Aceh.

The British Embassy said that a number of British citizens remained unaccounted for but Charles Humfrey, the Ambassador, said that he had received no confirmed reports of British casualties.

Almost all the deaths were in the province of Aceh, which covers the northernmost tip of Sumatra. More than 9,000 people died in Banda Aceh, home to more than 400,000. Survivors described five minutes of violent shaking before the waves, some as high as 60ft, came barrelling in across the coastal plain and smashed into the city, leaving devastation in their wake.

Bloated bodies still lay uncovered in the streets yesterday. Volunteers, wearing face masks against the smell, struggled to load the corpses on to trucks and vans that took them out to a seven-acre pit where they were unceremoniously buried by a mechanical digger. Television correspondents sobbed as they tried to describe the scene to their audiences by telephone.

In Meulaboh, the biggest town on the northwestern coast, preliminary estimates say that 10,000 people, or one in ten of the population, have died. Local media said the authorities received a desperate SOS from the town saying that time was running out for the survivors. Military aircraft were dropping packets of instant noodles yesterday afternoon in a frantic effort to help the survivors.

Michael Elmquist, the head of the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Assistance in Jakarta, said that Mr Kalla’s figures of 25,000 dead could turn out to be an underestimate. “We have heard the reports of total devastation on the west coast of Sumatra,” he said. “There could be much more than that.”

The biggest fear now is the spread of disease. Experience has shown that in many cases more people die in post- disaster epidemics of infectious diseases such as cholera and typhoid than are killed by the disaster itself.

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