HUNDREDS of people were reported dead yesterday in a cyclone that battered coastal areas of Bangladesh.
Many stricken villages remained isolated, so official figures were incomplete, with the confirmed death toll last night 112.
But the Bangladesh Times, a government-run daily, reported that up to 500 people were feared dead. Other newspapers, quoting their own sources, put the death toll at more than 350. More than 2,000 people were injured in Chittagong alone, they said.
Some 250 others had been killed in Cox's Bazar, one of the areas worst-hit by the cyclone, the newspapers said. About 100 fishermen from the coastal district of Patuakhali were missing at sea.
Government officials said army, naval and police units joined thousands of volunteers and fanned out across coastal regions in the south-east of the country in a massive rescue and relief operation.
According to Mr Golam Rabbani, director of the Cyclone Preparedness Centre in Chittagong, winds of more than 124 m.p.h. pounded the coast and off-shore islands.
Disaster management officials said the death toll was much lower than feared because the cyclone struck the coastline during low tide at sea.
Bangladesh's worst cyclone in 1991 killed 138,000 people and left millions homeless.