Mourners in Sri Lanka buried their dead with bare hands yesterday while displaced and hungry islanders in Indonesia looted stores following explosive tidal waves that the United Nations said may be history's costliest natural disaster.

　　The death toll rose dramatically to 44,000, and officials expected it to rise further.

　　A dozen nations in a band of destruction from Southeast Asia to Africa tallied corpses at tropical beaches, devastated villages and choked hospital morgues, with 10,000 dead found in a single Indonesian town. Thousands of people were missing, and millions remained homeless.

　　Aid agencies feared malaria and cholera may add to the toll from Sunday's massive quake-sparked waves, and mounted what UN officials said would be the world's biggest relief effort.

　　"This is unprecedented," said Yvette Stevens, an emergency relief coordinator of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

　　But help wasn't arriving fast enough for Indonesia's Sumatra island, where residents turned to looting to find food.

　　"There is no help, it is each person for themselves here," district official Tengku Zulkarnain told el-Shinta radio from the island's devastated western coast.

　　Emergency workers who reached the northern tip of Sumatra island found that 10,000 people had been killed in a single town, Meulaboh, said Purnomo Sidik, national disaster director at the Social Affairs Ministry.

　　In Sri Lanka, the waves had flung a train off its tracks, leaving many of its 1,000 passengers dead or missing, police said yesterday, as rescuers uncovered thousands of bodies, bringing the island nation's toll to 18,706.

　　Sunday's 9.0-magnitude earthquake under the Indian Ocean shot concussions of water onto coastlines from Indonesia to Somalia, drowning thousands. Almost a third of the dead were children, the UN children's agency estimated.

　　About 19,000 were killed in Indonesia, more than 4,000 in India and more than 1,500 in Thailand. Indonesia's vice president estimated his country had as many as 25,000 victims, bringing the potential toll up to 50,000.

　　National elections were postponed indefinitely in the Maldives, an Indian Ocean archipelago where 55 were killed.

　　In Sri Lanka's severely hit town of Galle, officials mounted a loudspeaker on a fire engine to advise residents to lay bodies on roads for collection. Elsewhere in Sri Lanka, residents took on burial efforts with forks or even bare hands to scrape a final resting place for victims.

　　The tidal waves and flooding have uprooted land mines in the war-torn country, threatening to kill or maim aid workers and survivors attempting to return to what's left of their homes.

　　Sri Lanka's air force evacuated former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl from the hotel where he was stranded in the hard-hit south to Germany's embassy in Colombo. Kohl, 74, was vacationing and uninjured, spokesman Ulrich Pohlmann said in Berlin.

　　Indonesia's Sumatra was nearest the epicenter of Sunday's monstrous quake, the world's biggest in 40 years, and rescuers there battled to reach isolated coasts and dig into rubble of destroyed houses to seek survivors and retrieve the dead.

　　In once-thriving resorts of southern Thailand, volunteers dragged scores of corpses, including many foreign tourists, from beaches, inland pools and the debris of once-ritzy hotels.

　　The disaster could be history's costliest, with "many billions of dollars" of damage, said UN Undersecretary Jan Egeland, who is in charge of emergency relief coordination. Millions face a hazardous future because of polluted drinking water and a lack of health services, he said.

　　Scores of people also were killed in Malaysia, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. The waves traveled as far as Somalia, with 100 dead, and Tanzania, with 10. A handful of deaths also were reported in Seychelles and Kenya.

　　(See more on Page 2, 4, 6)

　　(The Associated Press)