THE bodies of British and other Western tourists are being secretly buried in vast mass graves in an open field close to a busy road.

Families still searching for missing relatives were not told of the decision to dispose hastily of hundreds of unidentified victims yesterday with no ceremony or memorial in a mass burial site on scrubland owned by a nearby Buddhist temple.

Local Red Cross officials told The Times that they were ordered to prepare a site for 10,000 bodies, far more than the Thai Government says were killed by the tsunami, raising doubts that a true count of victims will ever be known.

Grieving relatives of all nationalities are banned from visiting this sprawling site, which is hidden behind a line of banyan trees near the end of an unmarked lane at Bang Muang, 80 miles north of Phuket.

As bodies wrapped in plastic sheets were carried in the bucket of a mechanical digger to the edge of open trenches, Weiapol Pitcun, a Thai official, said: “This may look insensitive but what else can we do? There are too many for us to cope with, so this is the most efficient way to store the bodies.”

Mr Pitcun said that the authorities would deter visits by relatives to prevent the site from becoming a place of pilgrimage. “Families should not come here, it will only upset them,” he said. “Tell them there is not anything worthwhile to see.”

The slow pace of identification, the red tape and now this tactless method of dealing with the remains is certain to compound the grief of relatives who arrive on every flight to Thailand, determined not to leave until they have found what they came for.

Even if they discover this place and evade the security cordon there is nothing on the long line of stakes stuck in mounds of earth to identify the gender, the race or the age of those buried here.

From first light, construction teams had worked to gouge out 20 trenches, each more than 150 yards long.

Armed police deterred local onlookers from investigating what was happening in this rural backwater near the Yanyoa Buddhist temple in Phangnga province, home to some of Thailand’s favourite resorts, and the worst-hit region in this disaster.

Twenty yards from where weary teenage volunteers clad in white forensic science suits and orange rubber gloves were laying bodies side by side in shallow pits, there were half a dozen funeral pyres burning throughout the day as Thai victims, identified by their families, were cremated in the open air.

With a shortage of fuel, workers threw bicycle inner tubes and car tyres on top of the flimsy, white plywood coffins to make them burn faster. Columns of acrid smoke carried on the sea breeze drifted across the country lane briefly obliterating the sight of the open graves.

Monks from the temple occasionally appeared to say prayers over the funeral pyres but paid no attention to the procession of burials across the narrow lane. Shopowners less than a mile away were astounded to be told that Thailand’s most miserable landmark was on their doorstep.

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