Confirmed Death Toll Surpasses 60,000

Deaths in the tsunami disaster could top 100,000 when figures for India's Bay of Bengal islands are known, a senior international Red Cross official said on Wednesday.

In Indonesia, an official from the social affairs ministry said the country's toll was more than 32,800 after it took the full force of Sunday's huge earthquake and tsunami waves that swallowed entire coastal villages. UN officials said that the number of dead could reach 80,000 in Indonesia alone.

In Sri Lanka, 17,800 people, including at least 70 foreigners, were killed by the tsunamis.

The death toll in India crossed 9,000 with many thousands still missing, officials said.

The toll includes 4,000 in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, close to the epicenter of the Indonesian earthquake that produced the tsunamis, and another 4,500 in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

More than 1,500 people, among them more than 700 foreign tourists, were killed in southern Thailand, officials said. They feared that most of around 1,500 people still missing were foreign tourists.

In Myanmar (Burma) at least 90 people were killed, according to the United Nations, while 65 people were dead in Malaysia, officials said.

At least 55 people including two British holidaymakers were killed in the tourist paradise of the Maldives while another 69 were missing, officials said.

Fatalities also occurred on the east coast of Africa where 100 fishermen were declared dead in Somalia, 10 in Tanzania and one in Kenya.

New threat from disease

Experts warned that disease could multiply the horror of Asia's tsunami catastrophe, pushing estimates of the final toll to over 100,000 as the world's biggest ever relief operation stuttered into life against enormous odds Wednesday.

"There is a chance that we could have at least as many dying from communicable diseases as we had dying from the tsunami," said David Nabarro, the top official at the World Health Organization dealing with humanitarian crises.

The task of preventing this second wave of suffering is unprecedented, with UN disaster relief coordinator Jan Egeland saying relief operations would be the biggest in history.

While the aid organizations made their plans and governments around the world pledged cash and dispatched ships and aircraft to help, the millions of bereaved and homeless faced a seemingly hopeless task of rebuilding shattered lives amidst utter chaos.

Miracles among the horror

There were stories of miraculous escapes, such as that of a 13-year-old girl who survived after spending two days clinging to a wooden door in the Indian Ocean after being swept off a remote island.

But there were far more stories of unspeakable horror, with mass burials underway everywhere accompanied by huge outpourings of grief from people who had lost their entire families, homes and livelihoods.

In Indonesia's Aceh province, fast emerging as the quake's ground zero, survivors scrabbled for food among mud and corpses. Great tracts of land remain under surging waters and there has been no word from many isolated communities.

The first shipments of international aid arrived in the city of Banda Aceh, 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) northwest of Jakarta on Wednesday, but with no trucks or fuel to distribute it, starvation loomed for thousands.

Throughout the region, hundreds of rescue ships, helicopters and planes were mobilized on relief missions.

Asian stock markets hitting highs

In a sign of the brutal disconnect between investors and the poor who suffered the tragedy, however, Indonesian and Indian stock markets were hitting record highs on perceived economic good times.

For investors, the headline figure since Sunday has not been the catastrophic death toll in remote stretches of the Indian Ocean among people who were hardly movers and shakers in the global economy.

Instead, the business community has paid more attention to studies that foreign insurance firms were largely unscathed by the killer waves and that major tour operators have been forced to re-route holidaymakers.