Island of 1,500 inhabitants now has 500

Indian islands: A senior coastguard official yesterday reported uncovering at least 1,000 more dead on the remote Chowra island, one of several on India's off-shore Andaman and Nicobar territory, bringing the death toll in the archipelago to over 4,000.

"We have only 500 survivors on Chowra, the rest were totally washed away," he said, adding that the island had a population of 1,500 before the tsunami hit on Sunday.

Chowra is a tribal island close to Indonesia's Sumatra where the devastating undersea quake had its epicentre.

The Nicobar group lies about 150 km from Sumatra while the larger Andamans, 1,200 km from mainland India, are spread across around 792 km.

The entire archipelago lies close to where the massive undersea earthquake began, sending "waves taller than buildings" across the Indian Ocean, killing tens of thousands in the region as far away as Africa and devastating the shorelines of Thailand, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India and the Maldives.

The official, who declined be identified, forecast the death toll on Car Nicobar island, south of the Andamans, could top 10,000 or a third of its entire population.

"Eighty per cent of the buildings were flattened on Car Nicobar," he said after returning from there to Port Blair, capital of the Andamans. "It is flat and people had no place to run," he added.

An independent 24-hour news channel made a similar claim. It declared that the Nicobar group of islands, none of them more than 10 km wide, were remote and inaccessible, making it likely that many locals had died unknown to the outside world.

The Andamans' police chief had given a figure of 3,000 dead and as many again missing on Monday as reports came in from across the chain of 572 islands. Officials privately admitted, however, that given the intensity of the waves, this remained a conservative estimate.

Indian and foreign tourists mobbed the lone airport in Port Blair to catch flights leaving the holiday paradise as the seawater rose suddenly again early yesterday, causing fears of more tidal waves.

Police, meanwhile, began listing dozens of islands in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands with populations of 1,500 to 200 from where they had no information since the tsunami struck.

The federal government has not carried out much development on the islands, famed for their pristine beaches. Consequently, the infrastructure hiatus had left many communities cut off after the waves struck.

The islands are home to some of the world's most primitive tribes, one of whom wear no clothes, hunt and fish to eat and have little or no concept of the outside world. Many islands in the group can only be reached by boat or helicopter.

India's Home Minister, Mr Shivraj Patil, said the number of dead on the archipelago was difficult to estimate. "If you look at the number of missing people, it's huge," he said.

On the southern Indian mainland, bodies were quickly piled into mass graves as worries grew about outbreaks of disease from decomposing corpses. Hospital staff and visitors wore masks where bodies were being collected as vultures and crows gathered overhead.

In Nagapattinam, one of the worse affected in Tamil Nadu, corpses were washed up by the sea and found wedged among collapsed shacks or floating in large lakes left behind by the invading sea.

There was a stench of rotting bodies a long distance from the beaches.

Many of the dead were women and children from poor fishing families whose entire existence had been wiped out, replaced by rubble and destruction.

Police officials warned against health concerns from the decomposing bodies, stressing to locals the urgency of disposing of the corpses swiftly.

"I don't think my boy and girl would have made it through this havoc," said Kolanda Velu, in Cuddalore, one of the state's worst-hit districts, 170 km south of Tamil Nadu's capital Madras.

"But I hope and pray that we can at least find their bodies so that we can see them one last time and give them a decent burial," he said, fighting back tears outside a makeshift government shelter.

At least 27 Indian Air Force personnel died and another 75 were reported missing in the country's highly secret Car Nicobar military base in the Andaman Sea after the tsunami waves struck the island archipelago.

The tidal waves had also reportedly devastated Nicobar's strategic air base that was India's first tri-service command comprising the army, navy and air force and formed three years ago after the country became a nuclear weapon state.