Death toll in Asian quake disaster more than 156,000
Pakistan Times Foreign Desk

JAKARTA (Indonesia): The number of people killed when an earthquake and tsunamis devastated Indian Ocean coastlines on December-26 stood at 156,237 Sunday as Sri Lanka and India both raised their number of dead.

Hardest-hit Indonesia's death toll remained at 104,055 Sunday, a day after some 3,000 new deaths were added to it.

In Sri Lanka, 30,718 were confirmed killed, the government said. Another 4,939 people were still missing, while the number of people displaced by the catastrophe was around 512,690, according to government figures.

In neighbouring India, the official toll stood at 10,022 with the number of missing at 5,617, most of them presumed dead.

The death toll in Thailand climbed above 5,300, but the number of missing kept dropping as authorities double-checked initial reports, the interior ministry said.

Fourteen more people were confirmed dead Saturday, bringing the death toll to 5,305. The list of missing dropped by more than 70, as authorities revised their figures to 3,498 missing.

Myanmar's Prime Minister Soe Win said Thursday 59 people were killed in the tsunamis and more than 3,200 left homeless. This was down from the UN's estimated 90.

At least 82 people were killed and another 26 were missing in the Maldives, a government spokesman said.

Sixty-eight people were dead in Malaysia, most of them in Penang, according to police, while in Bangladesh a father and child were killed after a tourist boat capsized in large waves, officials said.

Fatalities also occurred on the east coast of Africa where 298 people were declared dead in Somalia, 10 in Tanzania and one in Kenya.

Break-up

The US Geological Survey said the earthquake west of the Indonesian island of Sumatra measured 9.0 on the Richter scale, making it the largest quake worldwide in four decades.

Death toll

* India's figure includes 5,617, listed as missing, most of them presumed dead.●