Tsunami toll likely to cross 500

MENTAWAI ISLANDS. October 29. KAZINFORM Rescuers searching islands ravaged by a tsunami off western Indonesia raised the death toll to 370 Thursday as more bodies were found and said the number is likely to cross 500 because hundreds of missing people may have been swept away; Kazinform refers to The Arab News.

Elsewhere in Indonesia, the volcano that killed 33 people this week began erupting again, though there were no reports of new injuries or damage. Mourners held a mass burial Thursday during a lull in Mount Merapi's rumblings.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono met with survivors of the twin catastrophes, which struck within 24 hours in different corners of the seismically charged region, severely testing the nation's emergency response network.

Officials say a multimillion-dollar warning system installed after a monster 2004 quake and tsunami broke down one month ago because it was not being properly maintained.

In the tsunami-ravaged Mentawai islands, search and rescue teams - kept away for days by stormy seas and bad weather - found roads and beaches with swollen corpses lying on them, according to Harmensyah, head of the West Sumatra provincial disaster management center. Some wore face masks as they wrapped corpses in black body bags on Pagai Utara, one of the four main islands in the Mentawai chain located between Sumatra and the Indian Ocean. Huge swaths of land were underwater and houses lay crumpled with tires and slabs of concrete piled on the surrounding sand.

Ferry Faisal, of the West Sumatra provincial disaster management agency, raised the official toll Thursday to 370 from 311 earlier in the day. He said 338 people are still missing.

Harmensyah said the teams were losing hope of finding those missing since the wall of water, created by a 7.8-magnitude earthquake, crashed into the islands on Monday; Kazinform cites The Arab News.

See www.arabnews.com for full version