Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee and Congress Party leader Sonia Gandhi visited the capital of the island chain and far-flung Car Nicobar in the Indian Ocean to assess the damage Monday.

District official G.C. Gupta said an Indian air force base on Car Nicobar island was swept away by a tsunami that struck Sunday with more than 100 military personnel and family and support workers believed dead.

Indian naval ships were steaming to the area which holds more than 45,000 people on Greater Car Nicobar, its smaller sibling and as many as 14 nearby populated islands.

Gupta, speaking to reporters travelling with Gandhi, Mukherjee and Air Force Chief S. Krishnaswamy in Port Blair, said communications in the area remained patchy.

"The villages are spread all over, there are 30,000 people that need to be accounted for. Some may have fled into the interior jungles or been swept out to sea," Gupta said. "Efforts are underway to find them."

The population on the islands had swelled at Christmas as many of the people are Christians and were celebrating on the beach when the huge walls of water hit, Gupta said.

The tsunami and several aftershocks followed a massive earthquake centered off the coast of the nearby Indonesian island of Sumatra on Sunday.

"Everybody is going through a trauma here" Gandhi, who met tribals and local people at a school here and went round various areas, told reporters.

"We went to various areas (in the Car Nicobar islands) and people told us about the hardships... their traumatic experiences... there were government employees who were angry and agitated at the administration," she said, adding it was difficult to provide help because the communication system was not working.

On the plane back to Madras from Port Blair in Tamil Nadu state where Gandhi arrived Monday night, she told reporters the official death toll in the Andaman and Nicobar was 500 people.

The federal government has been cautious in assessing the death toll with the cabinet saying Monday the preliminary figure was close to 4,000 dead excluding Car Nicobar where the toll is likely to be "quite high", Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said.

Totals from state and local officials show at least 6,823 dead included 3,000 in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and another 3,600 in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu and the former French colony of Pondicherry.

The remote archipelago lies 1,200 kilometres (745 miles) from mainland India and the chain is spread over 800 kilometres (500 miles) north to south.

Blessed with miles of pristine beaches and a rich variety of animal life, New Delhi has carried out little development there, intending to leave indigenous tribespeople in peace.

The isolation and lack of infrastructure has left whole communities incommunicado after the giant waves struck on Sunday.

Six hunter-gatherer tribes including the fearsome Sentinelese aborigines inhabit 38 of the 572 rainforested islands, living in seclusion from outside world for millennia.

India has protected the tribes from modern contact in the fear of bacterial contamination, and little was known of their fate.

Shompen aborigines, numbering just 100, have occupied the Great Nicobar island for up to 60,000 years without being touched by modernity.

The Nicobaris, numbering around 30,000, form the largest tribal group but they have left the forests to live in the modern islet-town of Nicobar.

The Great Andamanese, who numbered as many as 10,000 in the 18th century, were decimated by the British after the islanders refused to submit to the crown.

By the 1970s just 19 survived, and while their numbers have crept up to 29 and homes built for them on tiny Strait island, their fate was uncertain even before the tsunamis hit.

Genetic evidence suggests that the pygmy-like aborigines - of negrito origin with dark skin and curly hair that sets them apart from their Asian neighbours - have lived on the Andamans from the dawn of civilisation.

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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