Unidentified corpses kept in storage

Here, in the spiralling confusion about the true size of Britain's loss in the tsunami, is one of the places where they are trying to piece the story together. Three clean, white shipping containers have been dumped in the street, a back lane of Colombo's Borella district, parked alongside cars and motorcycle rickshaws; pedestrians and vehicles wandering curiously past. Inside those refrigerated containers are 25 so far nameless foreign corpses, many of them almost certainly British, part of the still unknown, and potentially enormous, toll of British dead.

Police Inspector BDS Perera, whose officers are on guard, says the containers are the responsibility of a team from Scotland Yard. Only they can order them unlocked.

"The number of bodies is increasing. I think there are more people missing than you have been told," he says. "The foreign police officers, they come here in the morning, then they go out to the field to find more bodies."

The containers are parked just down from the official police mortuary, which is, of course, overwhelmed.

On the building's verandah, silent Sri Lankans look through a wall of horrormovie pictures of the latest local victims; disfigured and bloated after days in the sea.

Their mouths are appallingly misshapen, as if they had been forced to swallow a rugby ball, with the marks of dried blood which has poured from their lips. The lips themselves are light blue and swollen. The eyes are bulging at 45-degree angles to the faces. They look like crude children's toys, not people. The pictures of those few who have been identified have a small square of sticking-plaster over them to spare us any further sight.

The whites in the white containers almost certainly look just the same; but there are no pictures of them on the wall. Their identification is being done

less brutally, through DNA sampling, too expensive for the locals.

Two tests are being done inside the mortuary as we speak, Inspector Perera says. The first has just identified a one-year-old Norwegian baby.

The official Foreign Office figure for Sri Lanka is 10 confirmed dead, with another 20 missing, out of a total official missing and dead figure of 199 across the region. The High Commission has fuelled suspicion by flatly refusing to discuss reports that the actual missing figure is far higher.

Nor will it tell us anything about what Scotland Yard is doing here. But there are five officers, led, the Standard understands, by Dave Field. Inspector Perera says they visit regularly and must be in attendance whenever the containers are opened.

While we are at the mortuary, two of the Scotland Yard officers, Mr Field and a woman, arrive in a white fourwheel-drive vehicle, identity badges swinging from their necks.

Have they been out looking for bodies today? No, says the woman, who refuses to give her name or say anything else. Then they disappear inside. At another Colombo way-station for the international dead, the AF Raymond funeral parlour, there are another two white shipping containers, this time stacked in the car park.

A whiteboard gives the names of the bodies which have been identified yesterday and today - 11, including two Britons. There are seven unidentified European corpses on the premises. One of the duty officers says: "The bodies are difficult to embalm

Most package-tour victims can be easily assessed as missing or not. There are names, addresses, on file with the tour operators. But Sri Lanka was also full of rootless backpackers, registered with nobody except the local immigration authorities.

Other pieces of detective work being done in Colombo today include a name-byname comparison of arrival and departure records at airport immigration.

So here are the countinghouses. The totals are still unknown. But all the evidence suggests that we know only part of the true dimension of the problem.