The bloated bodies of hundreds of European tourists were found strewn on beaches and in hotels around the upmarket Thai resort strip of Khao Lak today as the full horror of Sunday's tsunami disaster came to light.
The overall death toll in the dozen countries affected by the tsunami, caused by a massive undersea earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra, soared past 60,000 as rescue-workers sifted through debris and reached isolated villages and resorts. More than 27,000 have died in Indonesia and 18,700 in Sri Lanka.
As aid agencies launched what may be the biggest relief operation in history, the UN health agency warned that as many people could die from disease caused by the devastation as did from the tsunami itself.
"There is certainly a chance that we could have as many dying from communicable diseases as from the tsunami," said Dr David Nabarro, a World Health Organisation expert.
Thai officials said that at least 770 bodies, of both foreigners and locals, were found along Khao Lak beach, on the Thai mainland north of Phuket island.
But local hotel owners said several thousand tourists, mostly Scandinavians, Germans and French, were unaccounted for. The number of British on the strip is not known, but it was not a popular area with UK holidaymakers.
Andrew Drummond, a Times correspondent who visited the beach strip, described the devastation. "There are bodies piled up at the side of the road, all wrapped up to be taken away, there are bodies strewn all over the place," he said. "Anyone can find bodies - you go off the beaten track and find bodies that probably no one has seen yet."
The overall death toll in Thailand climbed past 1,500, around half of them foreigners, but the country's Foreign Minister said he expected it to end up in the thousands.
So far, just 17 Britons have been officially confirmed killed in the disaster. Ten died in Thailand, four in Sri Lanka and three in the Maldives.
There were reports today of other British dead, including the daughter and grand-daughter of the director Lord Attenborough in Thailand. Drummond said he expected the British death toll to rise significantly, particularly from resorts on Phi Phi island, Phuket and Krabbi.
The gruesome discovery at Khao Lak was repeated around the Indian Ocean basin as rescue-workers reached villages, settlements and resorts that had been cut off since the tidal waves hit on Sunday morning.
In Indonesia, the official death toll from the disaster in Aceh province on Sumatra soared to some 27,000, according to the Government's disaster relief centre. Sri Lanka - which was hit by the full blast of the tsunami - raised its official toll from 12,000 to 19,000, although tens of thousands of people were still missing.
"Dead bodies are washing ashore along the coast," Sumedha Jayasena, the Sri Lankan minister co-ordinating relief efforts, told Reuters. "Reports reaching us from the rescue workers indicate there are 25,000 feared dead, and we don't know what to do."
Among those killed in Sri Lanka were around 1,000 passengers on a train heading to the devastated town of Galle when the tsunami struck. The train, called "Samudradev" or "Queen of the Sea", was simply thrown off its tracks by the wave.
Buddhist priests held prayers for the dead as the bodies were cremated. For Muslim victims, a mass grave was dug with the help of a bulldozer.
The Sri Lankan air force said this afternoon that among those it had rescued was Helmut Kohl, the former German Chancellor, who was stranded in a southern beach resort destroyed by the tsunami.
India reported 11,500 killed, but that figure, too, was climbing steadily. That toll includes 7,000 dead on the Andaman and Nicobar islands, a remote archipelago of more than 500 islands perched right on the faultline from Sunday's earthquake.
Khao Lak, renowned for its sandy beaches, perfect climate and scuba diving in the clear blue waters of the Andaman sea, was a magnet for northern European tourists, especially Swedes and Germans.
For Sweden, the distant tsunami could prove especially painful. Around 1,500 Swedes are still missing in Thailand, where up to 30,000 were enjoying a Christmas break. Many of those were in the Khao Lak area and Swedish officials said they thought many had perished.
Up to 10,000 Swedes are thought to have travelled independently, making their whereabouts harder to track. Soldiers used bulldozers to push into the strip of resorts along the Khao Lak beach, picking the bodies of European tourists from ruined gardens and suites.
The stench of death hung over the 20-mile stretch of coast, an up-and-coming area popular with tourists wanting to escape from Thailand's backpacker-style resort areas. Bloated and rotten bodies remained littered along the shorefront and 200 corpses, most of them of foreigners, were laid out in a makeshift mortuary at a Buddhist temple.
Tourists from more than 20 countries were staying at international hotels along the strip such as the Le Meridien, Novotel and Sofitel.
The Sofitel, owned by the French Accor group, was believed to have been especially badly hit. The first floors of the three-storey, Thai-style building were destroyed, and thick mud caked the landscaped area between the lobby and beach, a distance of some 300 yards.
Several rotting bodies could be seen on the beach, under debris and in a pool of water in front of the hotel as Thai soldiers moved in to search for survivors and the dead.
"I lost my girlfriend. We saw the wave coming. It was so huge we had no time to run," said Karl Kalteka of Munich, Germany, who was at the beach in front of the Sofitel when the first wave struck. "I saw many kids perish. I saw parents trying to hold them but it was impossible. It was hell."
Jean-Marc Espalioux, chairman of the Accor group, said hope was fading for hundreds of guests still missing from the hotel - "except for individual miracles".
In Phuket, dozens of parents desperate to find missing children rushed to a hospital after news circulated of an unidentified two-year-old boy with blond hair.
All left disappointed - except his Swedish uncle who said he found the boy after seeing a report on the internet. The boy - his face covered in red mosquito bites - was found sitting on a road soon after the waves hit.
A British fashion photographer, 33-year-old Simon Attlee, was missing after the tsunami blasted away his beach hut at Khao Lak. Mr Attlee was on holiday with his girlfriend, the Czech supermodel Petra Nemcova, who survived by hanging on to a tree for eight hours and is now in hospital with a broken pelvis and serious internal injuries.
Aid agencies have been forced to start planning from scratch to cope with the disaster, both because of the geographical spread and the numbers involved.
The United Nations said that the disaster was unique in encompassing such a large area and so many countries.
"The cost of the devastation will be in the billions of dollars," said Jan Egeland, head of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), who said it was possibly the worst natural disaster ever in terms of its human impact.
"We cannot fathom the cost of these poor societies and the nameless fishermen and fishing villages ... that have just been wiped out. Hundreds of thousands of livelihoods have gone."
Dozens perished in Malaysia, Myanmar and the Maldives and in Somalia, 3,600 miles to the west of the epicentre, 38 people were killed. At least 10 people were killed in Tanzania.
