Frenchman Philippe Gilbert told television station LCI he lost his four-year-old granddaughter when a huge wave crashed into their vacation spot in southern Sri Lanka, one of the countries worst hit by the effects of a massive earthquake off Indonesia that killed more than 10,000 people.

"I was completely picked up by an absolutely monstrous wave.... By pure luck I found myself stuck between two trees and was able to hold my breath long enough," he said from the resort of Tangalla.

But "I lost my granddaughter in that," he said.

A Portuguese holidaymaker, Irina Carvalho, told of a similar tragedy on Thailand's tourist haven of Phi Phi island where a wave hit, destroying structures along the coast and "throwing dozens of people into the sea."

She told the Lusa news agency her boat took on board two Greeks, and a Swedish man who was hurt when the wave broke over the restaurant where he was having breakfast with his wife, daughter aged four and son aged seven.

"He said that he clung on to his daughter and his wife to their son, but when he recovered his senses he was out at sea and his daughter was gone," Carvalho said.

Lusa added that an eight-month old Portuguese baby was swept out of her mother's arms on the Thai island resort of Phuket, according to a source close to the parents, who like Carvalho, live in the former Portuguese enclave of Macau in China.

France's foreign ministry confirmed the death of Gilbert's granddaughter and a French employee of the Club Med tourist organisation on Phuket.

"It was like the disaster film 'The Day After' had become reality," a German tourist in Phuket, Chris Arend, told the n-24 television station.

"I saw cars hurled 300 or 400 metres, jet-skis fly 400 metres and land in bungalows. It was a catastrophe. Those who knew the place, I can tell them: it no longer exists.... We'll never forget this Christmas vacation."

Mark McBride, from Belfast, said he and his girlfriend were out on a boat off Phuket when the wave hit. They picked up stranded Swedish snorkellers.

"There was one girl badly injured. She was with a group of 15 of which we picked up four. She had lost her boyfriend. There are lots of people missing, lots of people injured, lots of chaos."

Other British tourists said the violence was frightening.

"Initially we just heard a bang, a really loud bang, and I thought it was the hotel itself," Gerrard Donnelly, also staying in Phuket, told Sky News television.

"We initially thought it was a terrorist attack, then the wave came and we just kept running upstairs to get on as high ground as we could."

"People that were snorkelling were dragged along the coral and washed up on the beach, and people that were sunbathing got washed into the sea," a 29-year-old photographer from London, Simon Clark, said from the Thai island of Koh Ngai.

A Polish tourist in Phuket, who survived when she and her boyfriend quickly ducked back to their hotel room just before the tsunami struck, told her mother, Anna Kobus, that people "who had gone to the beach are all dead," PAP news agency reported.

Briton Alison Winward, an editor for the weekly English-language paper Phuket Gazette, said that 66 people, including 20 foreign nationals, were reported dead on Phuket.

The island's governor Udomsak Aswarangkul said 214 people were missing including 162 foreign tourists. He gave a death toll of 117 but did not specify nationalities.

In the Netherlands, the national tourist assistance organisation ANWB said it was seeking news of seven Dutch citizens missing in Thailand and three in Sri Lanka.

ANWB said it had heard from about 50 Dutch travellers, in Sri Lanka, Thailand and Sumatra who had lost their belongings in the catasatrophe. Some were sheltering on the roofs of their hotels.

In the southern Sri Lankan resort of Unawatuna a BBC reporter, Roland Buerk, said: "We were swept along for a few hundred metres, trying to dodge the motorcycles and the refrigerators and the cars that were coming with us."

He added: "This has caused incredible devastation here. There are cars in trees, buildings destroyed."

In the Maldives, Nicola Barton, a 33-year-old London resident on vacation, described similar destruction.

"It is just horrific. There are wooden sunbeds floating round the island, chairs from the restaurants and glass smashed everywhere, bulbs from the lighting," she said, adding: "We have all got life jackets in case it happens again."

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