The waves carried devastation far inland in Sri Lanka
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Thousands of people have been killed across south and east Asia in
massive sea surges triggered by the strongest earthquake in the world
for 40 years.
The 8.9 magnitude quake struck Aceh in Indonesia, sending a wall of water across thousands of kilometres of sea.
At least 1,500 died in Sri Lanka and more than 1,000 were killed in India.
Casualty figures are rising throughout the region
including in the tourist resorts of Thailand, which were packed at the
peak of the holiday season.
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DISASTER TOLL
Sri Lanka: 1,500 dead
India: 1,000 dead
Thailand: 100 dead
Indonesia: 400 dead
Malaysia: 7 dead
Source: Government officials
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At least 400 people died in Indonesia, but exact numbers for people
killed, injured or missing in the countries hit, are hard to confirm.
Hundreds are still thought to be missing from coastal
regions and, in Sri Lanka alone, officials say more than one million
people have been affected.
Severe flooding hit the low-lying Maldives islands in
the Indian Ocean, more than 2,500km (1,500 miles) from the quake's
epicentre.
Harrowing reports of people caught in the devastation
and dramatic tales of escape from the waves are emerging from around
the region.
A resident of Kakinada in India's southern Andra Pradesh
province, P Ramanamurthy, said he saw fishermen clinging to upturned
boats being swept out to sea.
"I was shocked to see innumerable fishing boats flying
on the shoulder of the waves, going back and forth into the sea, as if
made of paper," he told the Associated Press news agency.
Resort 'wiped out'
In Thailand, hundreds of holiday bungalows are reported to have been destroyed on the popular Phi Phi island.
The beach in India's Madras was packed when the waves hit
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Resort owner Chan Marongtaechar said he feared hundreds of people may have been lost.
"I am afraid that there will be a high figure of
foreigners missing in the sea, and also my staff," he told AP after
telephoning employees from Bangkok.
There has been little news from Indonesia, particularly
the strife-torn region of Aceh thought to be at the heart of the
earthquake, but one caller told a radio station he had seen people
killed in floods, AP said.
Panicked people reportedly fled their homes in the towns of Medan and Banda Aceh, the capitals of two of Sumatra's provinces.
Electricity and telephone networks in the area have stopped working,
making it difficult to confirm the extent of the damage, the BBC's
Rachel Harvey in Jakarta reports.
Hundreds more people are hurt or homeless across the region.
In Sri Lanka, President Chandrika Kumaratunga declared a
national disaster and the military has been deployed to help rescue
efforts.
Indonesia's location - along the Pacific geological "Ring of Fire" - makes it prone to volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.
Sunday's tremor - the fifth strongest since 1900 - had a
particularly widespread effect because it seems to have taken place
just below the surface of the ocean, analysts say.
Bruce Presgrave of the US Geological service told the
Reuters news agency: "These big earthquakes, when they occur in shallow
water... basically slosh the ocean floor... and it's as if you're
rocking water in the bathtub and that wave can travel throughout the
ocean."
IMPACT OF THE EARTHQUAKE
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Printable version
It's terrible - the rain and the wall of water and the horrific
shaking; in so many years of living here I have not ever seen anything
as terrible as this
BBC News reports
