Twenty years after the deadliest tsunami in history, Asia commemorates the victims

Commemoration ceremonies began on Thursday, December 26, in several Asian countries to mark the twentieth anniversary of the deadliest tsunami in history. It killed more than 220,000 people across Asia and as far away as Africa.

On December 26, 2004, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake off the west coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra caused huge waves that swept across Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and nine other countries of the Indian Ocean, with victims as far as Somalia (300 dead). At their maximum speed, the surges traveled at nearly 800 km/h and reached up to thirty meters high.

In Indonesia's Aceh province, where around 100,000 people were killed, the Baiturrahman Grand Mosque kicked off a series of commemorations across Asia, with a three-minute-long siren at the exact time of the disaster, followed by prayers.

In Aceh's capital, Banda Aceh, survivors and relatives of the victims are to participate in a ceremony around a mass grave and a night prayer at the grand mosque. Other religious ceremonies and beach vigils are to be held in Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand.

Indonesia, the most affected country

The tsunami killed 226,408 people, according to EM-DAT, a recognized global disaster database. The most affected area was the north of the island of Sumatra, where more than 120,000 people died out of a total of 165,708 deaths in Indonesia.

According to experts, the absence of a properly coordinated warning system in 2004 worsened the consequences of the disaster. Since then, some 1,400 stations around the world have reduced warning times after the formation of a tsunami to just a few minutes. The earthquake released energy equivalent to 23,000 times the power of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

In Thailand, more than 5,000 people died, half of them foreign tourists, and another 3,000 were missing. At a hotel in Phang Nga province, an exhibition on the tsunami has been set up and a documentary is to be shown, while government and UN officials are to speak on disaster preparedness. Tearful relatives of the victims laid flowers and wreaths in front of a curved wall in the shape of a tsunami wave, on which plaques bearing the victims' names are affixed.

In Sri Lanka, where more than 35,000 people have lost their lives, relatives of victims and survivors must board the Ocean Queen Express train towards Peraliya (90 kilometers south of Colombo), where wagons had been taken , causing around 1,000 deaths. Religious ceremonies, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Muslim, must also be organized across the island.