Fears for thousands of tourists
2004-12-26 18:41
Paris - Thousands of Europeans and other holidaymakers in southern Asia were feared hit by Sunday's massive tidal waves, officials said, but initial reports said all but a few seemed to have escaped with their lives from the disaster which killed more than 7 000 people.
European governments and agencies set up crisis centres and hotlines and offered help to the countries swept by the giant tsunamis sparked by a huge earthquake off Indonesia, as they prepared to send planes to bring their citizens home.
Briton Alison Winward, an editor for the weekly English-language paper Phuket Gazette, said that 66 people, including 20 foreign nationals, were reported dead on the Thai resort island of Phuket, a further 22 were missing and 691 injured, according to Kawee Sukunthamath chief of the Phuket Office of Disaster Prevention and Management.
A spokesperson for Patong Hospital, close to the western side of Phuket were the wave hit, said they had more than 50 bodies at the hospital and were treating around 400 people, many of them foreigners.
South Africa's foreign ministry said four of its citizens were reported missing, also in Thailand.
In the Netherlands, the Dutch tourist assistance organization ANWB reported three Dutch nationals missing in Sri Lanka, but this could not be officially confirmed.
The authorities in the low-lying Maldives Islands, which were hard hit by the racing floodwaters, said a British tourist had died of a heart attack.
Up to 10 000 British tourists could have been affected by the disaster, a British travel agency representative said in London.
Keith Betton of the Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) said his organization was in the process of assessing whom to fly home, and cancelling some holidays of people about to go.
Tourism officials said in addition to the Briton who died in the Maldives, "one or two were feared (dead) because they are missing" in the region.
A Czech was missing in southern Thailand, the CTK news agency quoted Prague's ambassador in Bangkok, Jiri Sitler, as saying, while another was in hospital with injuries.
Athens travel agencies said more than 1 000 Greeks were in the regions affected, while the Mega television station said two, a man and a woman in Phuket, had been injured and were having difficulty reaching hospitals.
Portuguese holidaymaker Irina Carvalho, speaking by telephone to Portugal's Lusa news agency and TSF radio station from the Thai island of Phi Phi, said a boat she was on had taken aboard two Greeks and a Swedish man, who was hurt when the wave hit the restaurant where he was dining with his wife, daughter aged four and son aged seven.
"He said that he clung on to his daughter and his wife to their son, but when he recovered his senses he was out at sea and his daughter was gone," Carvalho said.
Lusa also reported an eight-month-old Portuguese baby girl had been swept from her parents' arms by a wave at Phuket.