Jack Straw visits tsunami zone

Straw: up to 440 Britons feared dead

The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, who's visiting the Thai resort of Phuket, has said that around 440 British people are thought to have died.

While some missing people may still be found alive, he told a news conference this morning, many are now thought to have died in the Boxing Day Tsunami disaster.

Mr Straw has been talking to the world's media, during his official visit to Thailand, where it seems, the vast majority of British casualties have happened.

He has seen for himself the Patong Beach area, popular with British tourists - and talked to the Metropolitan police team which has been dealing with relatives of those missing and confirmed dead.

The official figures are now: 49 British people confirmed dead; 391 missing people listed as likely or very likely to have died - based on credible reports placing them in the area where the Tsunami struck on Boxing Day.

Sian Williams talked live to the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, just after his press conference in Phuket.

"Some of the relatives have said it's been chaos, " he conceded. "Disasters of this kind produce chaos - and it takes some time to produce order.

"The big difference between this and a train crash or a terrorist outrage is that it's much more difficult to estimate the numbers of those involved because the area of the disaster is so vast.

"Some bodies will never be found because they have gone out to sea; others will need to be identified using DNA, dental records or fingerprints," he said.

The number of people listed as missing and likely to be dead is made up of those seen in the Tsunami zone before the disaster.

But some back-packers may have been in the area without anyone knowing where they were.

The figures of the number of British people missing and feared dead have risen sharply, from around 200.

Mr Straw explained that - with the help of the police teams - they have been waiting for the figures to settle into an accurate pattern:

"Some other countries gave out total numbers of people who people reported missing. My judgement was that no purpose would be served by that - it would have scared people.

"Our tradition is to rely on police expertise."

Breakfast's Mike Sergeant looked at the impact on the tourist trade in Thailand.

And, we asked why people had been so generous, in a special debate about the psychology of giving.

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