INDONESIA: The global death toll from the Asian tsunami shot above 226,000 yesterday after Indonesia's Health Ministry confirmed the deaths of tens of thousands of people previously listed as missing.
The ministry raised the country's death toll to 166,320. It had previously given a figure of 95,450 while Indonesia's Ministry of Social Affairs had put the death toll at around 115,000 before it stopped counting.
Mr Dodi Indrasanto, a director at the health ministry's department of health affairs, said the new death total reflected the latest reports from the provinces of Aceh and North Sumatra, which were directly in the path of the killer tsunami spawned by a magnitude nine earthquake on St Stephen's Day.
The new figure lifted the total global death toll from the tsunami disaster to 226,566, although the number continues to rise as more deaths are reported around the region.
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, speaking before the health ministry released its latest figures, told a donor conference in Jakarta that the true extent of the catastrophe defied description.
"Perhaps we will never know the exact scale of the human casualties," he said.
Mr Indrasanto said the health ministry report, which had just 6,245 people still listed as missing, had been sent to Mr Yudhoyono late on Wednesday.
The ministry's figures said 617,159 people were still homeless in northern Sumatra more than three weeks after the killer wave struck. - (Reuters)