Scores of corpses, now mostly only skin and bone, are still being dragged from the wreckage every week in Aceh, emphasising the scale of the disaster and pushing up a death toll the extent of which may never be fully known.

While official searches have been called off in all of the Indian Ocean countries affected by the December 26 disaster, dogged volunteers such as Supriyadi refuse to give up.

"We have a social duty, it is the responsibility of every Muslim to do this," he told AFP, as he and his team of 15 volunteers took a break from their grim work in Lamno, a battered town on the west coast of devoutly Islamic Aceh.

"If we leave bodies unburied, we will be punished by God," he said.

Official figures put the global death toll from the tsunami at 180,355. But with confusion over the body count in Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka, even as ad hoc gangs unearth more, authorities have largely given up an accurate tally.

A further 39,853 people are still listed as missing, but fading posters on walls and dwindling numbers of photos of absent loved ones in newspaper classified sections indicate that most people have abandoned hope.

For Supriyadi and his gang, who stare vacantly into the distance with the expressions of men who have spent too long at the frontline, the figures are meaningless.

"It's hard to say how many we've found, we've stopped counting. Everyday our team deals with at least four bodies and we must have buried almost 100 in the past two weeks," he said.

On discovering a victim's remains, Supriyadi and his gang perform a brief Islamic burial rite, purifying the corpse with water, before sealing it in a body bag and interring it, usually on the spot where it was uncovered.

When identification papers are found, they try to contact relatives, but with almost all victims now reduced to skeletons, except where alluvial mud from the tsunami has preserved muscle and flesh, the majority remain anonymous.

"We can't even tell the difference between men and women. Maybe sometimes the long hair will tell us, sometimes the only way to tell is by what kind of underwear is on the body," said Supriyadi.

The passage of time has made the job increasingly tough for the volunteers, aged between 17 and 37, as the decomposing bodies present a health hazard against which their only protection is a face mask, a bottle of disinfectant and a pair of household rubber gloves.

However, it has also inured them to the bleak nature of their work.

"The first time you do it is quite traumatic, but then it just becomes normal," said Supriyadi, who left his job as a taxi driver in the Sumatra island city of Pekanbaru to join the hunt on January 1.

"I used to have bad dreams, a few of us have had the same nightmares of being possessed by evil spirits, but they went after a few days. After dealing with death for so long, even the devil wants to be our friend."

Those in the gang who were directly affected by the disaster, which has left hundreds of thousands of people traumatised, also shrug off the grisly task with blank stoicism.

"I do not feel any emotion, I just get on with the job," said Mohammad Hassan Ali, 28, who lost several relatives in the tsunami.

For the villagers who are faced with clearing the dead from their land as they begin to drift back to their homes on battered shorelines, teams like Supriyadi's offer a welcome service, sparing them from further horrors.

"It is very upsetting, we have stayed away for so long, afraid of another tsunami, and when we come back to start again, the bodies of our friends and relatives are waiting to meet us," said Mulyiani, a 20-year-old student.

Some 200 bodies were reportedly uncovered and buried in Mulyani's village of Lhokmet, roughly 10 kilometres (six miles) outside Lamno, in the first two weeks of June.

When their task is complete in Lamno, Supriyadi says his team will move further down the west coast to the towns of Calang and Meulaboh, both almost entirely wiped out by the tsunami.

But the end is far from in sight.

"One day I hope to rejoin my wife and two-year old son and go back to being a taxi driver, but I can't think about that now. God still has work for us."

All rights reserved. � 2004 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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