Straw's sorrow for victims

Jack Straw today told of his sorrow at the grief being suffered by British tsunami survivors he met in Thailand.

The Foreign Secretary said: "It is a dreadful tragedy for every family concerned and my heart goes out to them."

After talking to relatives of Britons still listed as missing and feared dead, he said: "You have to be straight with people and I had to say to the relatives that it may be many months before we are able to establish that the bodies are their relatives, or whether we will find their bodies at all. We are doing our very best.

"We are talking to our police teams here. It is very hard going." During a visit to Phuket, Mr Straw said he had met British families with harrowing stories.

He said: "One family had lost three children. I'm a husband and a son, a brother and a father and you just feel desperate about the grief of people like that." He also met two women who had been swept underwater, blasted through a shop window and sucked out again before finally being washed ashore, alive but badly injured.

As the feared death toll among British backpackers and other tourists continued to rise, Mr Straw denied the latest figures had been held back or played down.

The Foreign Office has been accused of adopting a secretive approach and refusing to give a true estimate of the numbers of Britons killed. There was also criticism of Tony Blair not returning from holiday in Egypt until a week after the Boxing Day disaster.

Mr Straw said: "There has been no delay. The fact [the death toll figures] have more than doubled in the space of four days indicates the imprecision of estimates of this kind, particularly in the early stages after a disaster of this magnitude."

He said the statistics were compiled by the Metropolitan Police using standard methods.

Mr Straw said that British forensic experts involved in previous incidents such as Lockerbie, the Bali bombing and the Potters Bar and Hatfield train crashes had underlined to him the complicated nature of compiling an accurate death toll.

He said: "The Metropolitan Police are doing a very, very careful job. They have to sift through these reports, including a lot of double

and triple counting. Some victims may never be identified." More than 500 unidentified bodies had recently arrived at just one centre in Thailand. Mr Straw added: "Bodies are still being washed up or unearthed, so the total number of potential casualties is not known." But Alan Duncan, Tory spokesman for international development, said: "It is extraordinary that the Foreign Office estimates for the number of unaccountedfor British citizens has more than doubled in a matter of days. We must hope that many of those missing are still found alive."

By this morning the Metropolitan Police casualty appeal centre in Hendon had received more than 136,000 calls concerning the fate of friends or relatives. The work of more than 300 staff manning the phones is painstaking.

Each call has to be carefully logged and matched against the names of victims in order to establish if that person is among the dead or injured or has simply not been in contact. Chief Superintendent Stephen MacDonald, head of the call centre, paid tribute to the hard work of his staff but warned the work could continue for a long time. He said: "I envisage the operation going on for a number of months. There will be bodies being found for several months and years and we need to be able to deal with that. People are desperate for information, which is precisely why we are so careful about giving out figures of those involved."

Mr Macdonald added: "We learned from 9/11 and other major incidents that in the long term, adopting a conservative-approach to figures of the dead and missing causes the least upset to people who are already traumatised."