Asia and Indonesia commemorate the devastating tsunami of December 26, 2004. A siren sounded Thursday in Indonesia, as survivors and relatives of the victims began to pay tribute to the memory of the approximately 220,000 people who perished in a tsunami which struck the Indian Ocean countries twenty years ago.
In the Indonesian city of Banda Aceh, an official ceremony at the Baiturrahman Grand Mosque kicked off a series of commemorations across Asia, with a three-minute-long siren at the exact time a tremor major earthquake caused immense devastating waves on December 26, 2004.
On that day, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake off the west coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra sent huge waves sweeping across Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and nine other countries. the Indian Ocean, with victims as far away as Somalia. Other religious ceremonies are to be held across the region as well as vigils on the beaches, where many tourists who came to celebrate Christmas in the sun had lost their lives.
The hardest hit area was the north of the island of Sumatra, where more than 120,000 people were killed out of a total of 165,708 deaths in Indonesia. In Thailand, more than 5,000 people died, half of them foreign tourists, and 3,000 others were missing. In Sri Lanka, where more than 35,000 people had lost their lives, relatives of victims and survivors had to board the Ocean Queen Express train towards Peraliya (90 km south of Colombo), where wagons had been taken away, causing around 1,000 deaths.
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