Tsunami death toll hits 166,320

Tsunami death toll hits 166,320

The Ministry of Health raised the country's death toll from the Dec. 26 tsunami to 166,320 on Wednesday, pushing the total number of people killed in the disaster around the region above 225,000.

A Health Ministry statement said the new figure was based on the latest reports from the provinces of Aceh and North Sumatra, which were directly in the path of the killer tsunami spawned by a magnitude 9 earthquake the day after Christmas.

The new figure put the global death toll from the tsunami disaster at 226,566, although this number continues to rise as more deaths are reported around the region.

Doti Indrasanto, a director in the ministry's health affairs department, said the sharp increase came after tens of thousands of people previously listed as missing were confirmed dead by officials on the ground.

The Ministry of Health had previously given a figure of 95,000 dead, while the Ministry of Social Affairs had put the death toll at about 115,000 and said on Tuesday it would stop giving new updates.

Officials concede that, given the extent of the disaster, exact numbers for Indonesia's death toll are likely to remain unclear and perhaps may never be known.

Indrasanto said that Health Ministry statistics had previously listed 77,000 people as missing. Now the ministry says only 6,245 people are missing.

"We have cross-checked this information and it is correct," Indrasanto told Reuters.

The Ministry of Health also said there were about 617,000 refugees in the country because of the tsunami, an increase of about 12,000 on its previous figure. --Reuters