The official toll of Britons dead or missing in the Asian tsunami disaster more than doubled yesterday to 440. And experts are working through a list of some 2,000 others reported missing after the St Stephen's Day tragedy whose cases are of "much, much less concern", a Metropolitan Police source said.
During a visit to Thailand, the British Foreign Secretary, Mr Jack Straw, said 49 Britons were confirmed dead while 391 were "likely or very likely" to have been involved as victims. The confirmed death toll includes 36 in Thailand, 10 in Sri Lanka and three in the Maldives.
If all those in the official estimate are confirmed to have died, the tsunami will have claimed more British lives than any other single event since the second World War.
"Overall, this therefore gives an estimated total of 440 British casualties for the region as a whole, the vast majority, tragically, in Thailand," Mr Straw told a press conference on the holiday island of Phuket.
He said some missing victims would never be traced. Relatives faced a period of "prolonged agony" as they waited for news of missing loved ones, he said.
Mr Straw said scores of experts were working to identify hundreds of bodies in one of the world's biggest forensic operations.
He added: "Some victims may never, ever be identified and my heart goes out to all those who face this terrible and, I fear, continuing ordeal."
Mr Straw said British forensic experts involved in previous incidents such as Lockerbie, the Bali bombing and the Potters Bar and Hatfield train crashes had stressed to him the size of the task.
"The agony of long uncertainty for many families and the scale of the effort still required is totally daunting," he said.
"There are many hundreds of dead in the mortuary areas. It is impossible to tell the country of origin of most of those poor people." He added: "There are teams here from 30 countries working together to identify their nationalities among the dead. This is one of the biggest international forensic operations ever mounted." Mr Straw said the British government had taken a "careful" approach to establishing the number of British dead, relying on Metropolitan Police Service methods used in previous disasters.
The Metropolitan Police are appealing for relatives to contact the call centre again once they have received news of loved ones previously feared missing. - (PA)