Tsunami survivor rescued after 25 days
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-01-22 23:20

A tribal man lived off coconuts for about 25 days on a tsunami devastated Indian island before he was rescued by a search boat, a military officer said on Saturday.

Michael Mangal was brought out of the tiny island of Pillow Panja earlier this week after the crew of a rescue dinghy saw him waving a flag made of his clothes, the officer said.

Mangal, who is from the Nicobarese tribe, told his rescuers the first giant wave which hit the Andaman and Nicobar chain of islands on Dec. 26 first sucked him into sea before subsequents waves threw him back to land.

"After that, once the waters receded he went to his village, but didn't find anybody," the officer told Reuters over telephone from Port Blair, the capital of the remote archipelago which are 1,200 km (750 miles) from the Indian mainland.

"It seems he just survived on coconuts."

Around 7,500 people, a majority of them Nicobarese tribals who normally live on the coast, have died in the island chain which had a population of more than 356,000.

Rescue and relief have been slow in coming to the islands mainly because all the harbor jetties were destroyed. Most of the 36 inhabitated islands in a chain of hundreds of islands can only be reached by sea.

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