Fierce flood waters washed a rhinoceros out of a national park into a nearby village where it killed a young man, as the death toll from monsoon rains in South Asia neared 600, police and relief officials said yesterday.

　　Heavy rains killed at least six people in the Indian desert state of Rajasthan, where residents have rarely seen a downpour in the past four years.

　　The death toll from rains, flooding, disease and panicked wildlife in the annual monsoon reached 585 across South Asia, officials said.

　　India has reported a total of 269 deaths, Bangladesh has reported 169, Pakistan 78, and Nepal 69, indicating that this year's casualties could be higher than usual. Last year, even with sparse and late monsoons in India, the death toll for all of South Asia was 1,000, with 25 million affected by the time the rains stopped in late August.

　　Four people, including two children, riding in a farm wagon died when it fell on Sunday into an overflowing drain near Jaipur, the capital of India's Rajasthan state, the Press Trust of India said. Seven others in the wagon were rescued by local villagers, PTI quoted police as saying. Elsewhere in the state, a teenage boy drowned in a canal, while lightning killed an old man, bringing Rajasthan's death toll to 29.

　　In India's northeast, Indian Health Minister Bhumidhar Barman said 82 people had died of malaria in Assam state in the past two months and five of diarrhea in the past week.

　　Overflowing rivers in Assam, of which Gauhati is the capital, have washed many people out of their homes, leaving them prey to insects, while floodwaters have polluted drinking water wells, increasing the cases of waterborne disease. A further 22 had died of drowning, he said.

　　More than 100 of this year's deaths in India have been in Assam, home to the Kaziranga National Park, the world's only natural habitat for the rare one-horned rhino.

　　Several animals fleeing floods in the reserve have been killed crossing highways or by running into poachers.

　　More than 5,000 people in Assam's Nalabari district, where the diarrhea deaths occurred on a river island, have been affected by waterborne diseases and 100 are in hospitals, a state health official said.