Tsunami-hit countries around the Indian Ocean held ceremonies today to remember the 10th anniversary of the disaster that killed some 230,000 people.

In the Indonesian province of Aceh, the area worst hit by the tsunami, an official ceremony was under way attended by Vice-President Jusuf Kalla.

Kalla thanked foreign countries for their involvement in rebuilding Aceh. “I had never seen such extraordinary solidarity and generosity as I saw after the tsunami,” Kalla said.

“Even children from around the world, from Germany to the United States, broke their piggy banks and sent the money to help tsunami victims.”

Indonesia was the hardest hit country, with some 130,000 people losing their lives.

Earlier, people prayed in mosques and at mass graves sites to remember their dead.

“I lost two children in the tsunami but I don’t know where they were buried,” 51-year-old Maimunah, who goes by only one name, said at a mass grave in Ulhee Lhueue in the provincial capital Banda Aceh. “But I’m praying here for all the victims,” she said.

In Sri Lanka, a commemorative train journey for tsunami survivors and their families ran from the capital Colombo and arrived in Pereliya in the south.

Over 1,400 people lost their lives on the same journey when the crowded train was hit by tsunami waves that claimed more than 35,000 lives across the country. The commemorative journey featured repaired carriages from the original train.

A two-minute silence was held throughout the country.

Multi-faith prayers were held on India’s Andaman and Nicobar islands, as officials and residents gathered in the capital Port Blair.

On the south-eastern Indian coast in Tamil Nadu’s Nagapattinam district, locals prayed at memorial pillars near the beach, and were to float offerings of food into the sea, said Vanaja Soundrabai of the rights organisation Sneha. Some schools also held prayers in the morning to remember the students they lost, she said.

More than 16,000 people died when the tsunami hit India.

In Thailand, interfaith ceremonies got under way at Ban Nam Khem village in Phangna province, where 2,000 people lost their lives, and the Mai Khao remembrance wall in Phuket.

The cross-denominational events are to be conducted by Buddhist monks, Christian priests and Muslim imams, to mark a disaster that also killed tourists of many nationalities.

The tsunami that struck on the morning of Dec 26, 2004, decimated coastal communities and killed 230,000 in over a dozen countries in one of the modern world’s worst natural disasters.

- dpa