Thousands lit candles, visited mass graves and observed 2 minutes of silence yesterday two years after a tsunami pulverized villages along Indian Ocean shores and killed or left missing about 230,000 people.

At a mosque in Ulee Lheue, Aceh, the Indonesian Province worst hit by monster waves that came rolling out of the sea on a bright Sunday morning, imam Usman Dodi told worshippers the tsunami was a religious warning.

"Please forgive the people who have left us for their wrongdoing," the imam prayed, returning to a sermon some religious leaders preached after a disaster that killed or left missing 169,000 people in northern Sumatra. Half a million were also made homeless.

The seaside mosque in Ulee Lheue became an icon of one of history's worst natural disasters.

It was the only building left standing after a magnitude 9.1 earthquake ruptured the ocean floor off the tip of northern Sumatra, triggering waves that slammed into the coastlines of a dozen Indian Ocean nations at the speed of a freight train.

Former US Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush visited the town and helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in rebuilding projects.

In Sri Lanka, church and temple bells rang across much of the country's south where reconstruction is almost complete. Like other tsunami-struck areas of the Indian Ocean rim, Sri Lankans observed two minutes of silence and lit candles at the time the tsunami struck.

In the south India fishing village of Keechankuppam, where more than 600 people died, people gathered to pray at a memorial stone shaped like a flower bud.

"They are somewhere here, watching my tears and these flowers, my young wife and little daughter," said Ramachandran Velayudhan, 46, before breaking down.

"I could not save them despite trying hard and I can never forgive myself for that. I should have died with them."

In Khao Lak, the southern coastal resort where most of Thailand's 5,395 victims died, students and foreigners gathered near a police patrol boat swept ashore two years ago to remember loved ones.

"We won't forget, but I don't dream about it," a German tourist in her 50s told Thai television.

"He was crazy in his head two years ago," she said, pointing to her husband, who also survived the deadly waves.

In the nearby town of Bang Muang, Buddhist monks, Catholic priests and Muslim clerics officiated at the opening of Anonymous Cemetery, where 409 tsunami victims who have not been identified were buried.

The identification process on those bodies would continue amid calls from the United States and six other European nations to speed up their work and to probe an alleged misuse of donations to fund the identification of those bodies.

Tsunami drills

Indian Ocean countries have installed expensive warning systems and are staging periodic evacuation drills to prepare better for another such disaster.

On the tourist island of Bali which was not affected by the 2004 tsunami around 15,000 people, most of them school children, took part in an evacuation drill.

"Oh, just run as far as you can," said Made Arimbawa, an elementary school student, when asked what he would do if a tsunami came.

But for tsunami survivors, the day was about looking back, not worrying about the future.

At a mass grave in the Ulee Lheue area, one of many such sites in Aceh where the scope of the disaster made individual burials impractical, Muria Yahya, 68, who lost two children and five grandchildren, prayed.

"I pray for my family, that they will be given the right place in the hereafter," Yahya said as she stood at the grave, where green grass now covers the bare earth that scarred the land just after the burials.

Source: China Daily