Thailand exhumes dead to identify missing

PHANG NGA, THAILAND - Thailand is to exhume hundreds buried after the Indian Ocean tsunami, restarting the task of putting names to thousands of unidentified bodies, including those of many foreign tourists.

The flow of aid to hundreds of thousands of survivors and homeless in Indonesia two weeks after the most widespread natural disaster in living memory was forced to pause after a helicopter crash and a powerful tremor on northern Sumatra island.

Panic-stricken people in the devastated Indonesian city of Banda Aceh fled homes and shelters after a pre-dawn aftershock on Monday evoked memories of the huge earthquake and tsunami that wrecked the region on December 26.

The tsunami triggered by the 9.0-magnitude quake killed at least 156,000 people around the Indian Ocean, with Aceh province on Sumatra's northern tip accounting for almost all of Indonesia's 104,000 deaths.

The waves killed about 30,000 people in Sri Lanka, 15,000 in India, more than 5,000 in Thailand and others in the Maldives, Myanmar, Bangladesh and several east African nations.

Thailand, where hundreds of foreign tourists died, said it would have to exhume more than 600 hastily buried bodies for fuller forensic tests. More than 2,000 of the country's 5,303 known dead have yet to be identified.

Even the most basic identification of many corpses as Thai or foreigner needed to be checked again, officials said.

Of the 2,159 unidentified people, 1,974 died in the coastal province of Phang Nga where the tsunami crumpled hotels on Khao Lak beach packed with foreign tourists and left an unknown number dead in a fishing village of several thousand people.

A senior official at the national disaster centre on Phuket island, just off Phang Nga, said the identification of the race of a dead person was often done only visually.

"From now on, when we say we can identify them, we must know their names and have some sort of document to verify their identification," said the official.

- REUTERS