Commemoration for the victims of the 2004 tsunami, at the Baiturrahman Grand Mosque, in Banda Aceh (Indonesia), December 26, 2024. YASUYOSHI CHIBA / AFP Commemoration ceremonies began on Thursday, December 26, in several Asian countries in order to mark the twentieth anniversary of the deadliest tsunami in history. It killed more than 220,000 people across Asia and 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 in the Indian Ocean, with victims as far away as Somalia (300 dead). The surges traveled, at their maximum speed, at nearly 800 kilometers per hour and reached up to 30 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. Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers How the science of tsunamis has progressed, twenty years after the cataclysm in Indonesia Read later In the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, survivors and relatives of victims must 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 database on disasters. 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 3,000 others 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, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Muslim ceremonies are also to be held across the island. Also read (2014) | Article reserved for our subscribers Tsunami of 2004: Return to Khao Lak, ten years later Read later Le Monde with AFP Reuse this content
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