We feared we were going to die

A Hampshire woman has told how she is lucky to be alive after she was caught in the tsunami disaster in the Indian Ocean.

Linda Smith, from Winchester, fought back tears as she described how the family holiday with her children and grandchildren turned to horror.

The family had been enjoying a festive break in Male in the Maldives when the disaster struck.

She said: "We thought we were going to die. It was a massive, massive swell which took everything with it.

"It was like a paradise from hell. Everyone on the island was utterly dumbstruck," said a clearly stunned Ms Smith who was ushered away by relatives.

She was speaking at Gatwick Airport on her return from the region where an estimated 50,000 people were killed in the unprecedented disaster.

Meanwhile, a pair of Hampshire newlyweds who were honeymooning in the Maldives have assured their families they are safe and well.

Mark Metherell, 26, and Sarah Baxter, 28, whose parents both live in Fareham, were staying in the beachside villa resort of Kuredu.

Mark's parents, John and Jacquelen, of Brendon Road and Sarah's parents, Chris and Sue, of Duncans Drive, were sick with worry until they got through to Mark and found out the couple were safe.

Mark and Sarah, who tied the knot in Titchfield before Christmas, were unaffected by the tragedy as they were staying north of the island.

Aid officials last night described the Asian tsunami horror as one of the worst natural disasters ever as the UN warned that the cost of rebuilding devastated areas would run to billions of dollars.

The death toll across 12 countries headed towards 60,000 and continued to rise by the hour.

Scores of decomposed bodies were still being pulled from coastlines, while aid agencies attempted to distribute medicine, food and water in the largest relief effort ever mounted.

Health experts said imminent outbreaks of malaria and cholera could prove as deadly as the effect of the undersea earthquake, which registered 9.0 on the Richter scale - the world's strongest in 40 years.

Yvette Stevens, UN emergency relief co-ordinator, said that the disaster will be the costliest ever and added: "This is unprecedented."

Killer waves, some 20ft high, were created by the quake off the west coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra at 0059am GMT on Sunday.

Their impact was felt on the coast of Somalia in eastern Africa - almost 3,000 miles from the quake's epicentre.

The Thai government was accused of playing down warnings of the disaster in an attempt to protect the country's lucrative tourist trade.

Officers from the country's meteorological department said information sent to tourist resorts had deliberately underestimated the threat.

A total of 19,000 are confirmed dead in Indonesia, 18,706 in Sri Lanka, 4,413 in India, 1,516 in Thailand, 100 in Somalia, 90 in Myanmar (Burma), 65 in Malaysia, 55 in the Maldives, 10 in Tanzania, two in the Seychelles, two in Bangladesh and one in Kenya.

Emergency workers who reached the northern tip of Sumatra island, closest to the quake epicentre, found that 10,000 people had been killed in a single town, Meulaboh.

Seventeen Britons have so far been confirmed as among the fatalities - ten in Thailand, four in Sri Lanka and three in the Maldives.

Among them were film director Lord Attenborough's 14-year-old granddaughter Lucy. Lord Attenborough's daughter Jane Holland and her mother-in-law, also Jane Holland, were missing feared dead.

A six-year-old boy from St Ives in Cornwall, who was on holiday with his family in Thailand, was also confirmed as dead.

And the unnamed boy's eight year-old brother was missing presumed dead along with his mother's 44-year-old boyfriend, who was originally from Essex.

The mother, who is 37, was apparently uninjured, Devon and Cornwall police said.

A British embassy official in Thailand said: "We are aware that there are a very large number of bodies as yet unidentified, in particular in Ko Lak.

"There has to be a danger that several, if not more, of the dead will be British."

In Sri Lanka, British embassy staff said three teams are scouring resorts for missing Britons, with scores feared dead.

Across the region the victims lie decomposing along roads, beaches and towns, as hospitals and morgues become choked with corpses.

Relatives in Sri Lanka have begun digging graves with their bare hands, anxious to bury their dead.

Aid workers have been warned that flooding has uprooted landmines in the war-torn country, leaving them at the risk of death as they help survivors.

In Indonesia, people have been forced to loot stores as food and water supplies run perilously low.

Across Asia, millions remain homeless and thousands are missing, with fears that hundreds of tourists, fishermen and villagers were simply swept out to sea and to their deaths.