Tourist spot becomes graveyard

KHAO LAK - Kilometres of tsunami-shattered beach hotels north of Thailand's Phuket island have begun yielding up their dead.

By the time dozens of hotels on the 10km stretch of sand and their 5000 rooms have been searched the toll from one beach is expected to top 1000.

Deputy Interior Minister Sutham Saengpratoom reckoned he saw that number of bodies on Khao Lak Beach opposite the Similan Islands when he flew over it. If correct, that would make it the worst-hit place in Thailand.

But many bodies were still buried in the rubble and the mud which is all that remains after a three-storey high tsunami smashed into Thailand's southern holiday playground at the peak of the tourist season.

Some were visible, a body slashed in half lay near the Sofitel, a cottage-style hotel owned by the French hotel group Accor, which said around 500 guests and staff were missing.

Troops had trucked about 100 bodies to a Buddhist temple at the southern end of the beach. At least six of them were visitors.

Local people said there were at least as many bodies at another temple.

Many more bodies were expected to be dug out of the ruins of what investors had hoped would turn Khao Lak into a competitor to Phuket, the island 50km to the south which is one of Asia's premier beach resorts.

Colonel Becha Kingwongsa said his men had extracted 30 bodies, including those of children, from the Sofitel.

Most were in the hotel dining room. "They didn't know what hit them," he said. The wall of water snapped the hotel's concrete pillars in half and wrought destruction up to the second of its three floors.

His men had many more cottages to search and they expected to find another 100 bodies.

Bejkhajorn Saithong, 39, searching for the body of his wife at the Ban Khao Lak Hotel, said the tsunami swept 500m inland and struck the second floor of a row of shops.

The hotel itself had been knocked off its foundations.

"My son is crying for his mother," he said.

"I think this is her. I recognise her hand, but I'm not sure."

In some places, the tsunami swept even further inland. It left a 30m marine police patrol boat tangled in the forest about 1km from shore, four bodies beside it.

Chantima Saengli, the owner of the equally devastated Blue Village Pagarang hotel, told a Bangkok radio station she knew about 60 of her Scandinavian guests were safe.

She feared the other 340 were dead, their bodies swept into the lush rain forest covering the hills behind the beach.

Confirmation of the scale of the disaster at Khao Lak would push Thailand's death toll beyond 2000. Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra ordered three days of mourning.

He cancelled plans to attend New Year celebrations in the northern city of Chiang Mai with tennis superstars Maria Sharapova and Venus Williams and urged officials to follow suit.

Thailand's official death toll was 990 - 200 of them Thais and the rest foreigners - Sutham told reporters.

Thaksin estimated the cost of the damage at 20 billion baht ($725 million).

- REUTERS