Toll close to 100,000, 5 million displaced

Rome (AsiaNews/Agencies) As the International Red Cross predicted yesterday, the death toll from Sunday's devastating underwater quake will soon reach 100,000.

The World Health Organisation has sounded the alarm warning that "up to 5 million people have become displaced and homeless".

Some people have lost everything; others are too afraid to go back home and left everything behind seeking refuge inland.

The official death toll now stands at 82,000, but that is not counting the missing: the countless unrecorded slum dwellers, the villagers who disappeared with their villages under the waves, the foreign workers like the thousand or so Burmese who, according to Thai farmers, vanished, not to mention the thousands of immigrants in Thailand employed on fishing boats for just one or two dollars a day. They, too, are unaccounted for.

Here are the official figures per country:

INDONESIA Officially, 45,268 people died, but Vice-President Jusuf Kalla said that the number could rise, reaching 80,000 on the island of Sumatra.

SRI LANKA The number of dead is 22,799; the wounded, 8,815.

INDIA More than 14,000 dead and missing, 6,000 in south-eastern state of Tamil Nadu. On the islands of Andaman and Nicobar in the Bay of Bengal there could have been as many 4,000 dead with thousands missing.

THAILAND At least 1,975 dead and 6043 missing, half of whom foreign tourists.

MALDIVES At least 75 recorded deaths and 42 injured.

MYANMAR At least 90 dead.

MALAYSIA At least 66 dead and more than 220 injured. More than a hundred people are missing from Penang Island, on the country's north-western coast.

BANGLADESH At least, two children died.

SOMALIA There were 114 deaths, mostly fishermen.

TANZANIA Ten deaths.

KENYA One death.