The countries of the Indian Ocean will mark 20 years since the destruction of the tsunami

Countries affected by the tsunami will next week remember more than 220,000 people who died in the Boxing Day disaster two decades ago, when huge waves hit communities along the Indian Ocean.

Seaside memorials and religious ceremonies will be held across Asia in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand, which were hit hardest by one of the worst disasters in modern history.

On December 26, 2004, tsunami waves reaching a height of 30 meters (98 feet) in some places wiped out coastal areas, separated families, left thousands homeless and killed tourists on winter break on palm-fringed beaches.

“My children, wife, father, mother, all my siblings were washed away,” said Baharuddin Zainun, 70, a survivor and fisherman in Indonesia's Aceh province.

“The same tragedy was felt by others. We feel the same feelings.”

The 9.1-magnitude earthquake caused the largest cable break ever recorded, sending massive aftershocks to communities along the Indian Ocean coast.

The opening of the ocean pushed waves traveling at twice the speed of a train, crossing the Indian Ocean within hours without warning.

226,408 people died as a result of the tsunami, according to EM-DAT, a global disaster database.

In Indonesia, where more than 160,000 died, mourners will gather in Banda Aceh for a series of events, starting with a moment of silence just before 8:00 local time (0100 GMT) when the tragedy struck.

Government officials, NGO representatives and members of the public will visit a mass grave in Banda Aceh where around 50,000 bodies have been buried, before the main evening prayer at the city's main mosque.

– Train festival –

In Sri Lanka, where more than 35,000 people were killed, a reconstructed train that was hit by massive waves 20 years ago will run from the capital Colombo to the same place in Peraliya where the train was robbed.

A short religious ceremony will be held with relatives of those who died in the incident that killed around 1,000 passengers, as well as civilians who boarded the train after the first wave hit the low-lying area.

Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Muslim ceremonies will also be held to remember the victims across the South Asian island nation.

In Thailand, where official figures say more than 5,000, almost half of them foreign tourists, and 3,000 remain missing, hundreds of people are expected to attend a government memorial service on December 26.

Among those invited are representatives of foreign countries whose visitors are about 2,500 dead.

At a hotel in Phang Nga province, there will be a tsunami exhibition, a documentary exhibition and presentations by the government and UN agencies on disaster preparedness and resilience.

Local residents and mourners from all over Thailand may hold illegal candlelight vigils along the beach.

The memorial “walk-run” scheduled for December 27 will start at Ban Nam Khem Tsunami Memorial Park, a coastal garden with a Buddha statue and a curved concrete wall representing a wave, before stopping at the nearby Tsunami Museum.

About 300 people were killed as far away as Somalia, with over 100 in the Maldives and dozens in Malaysia and Myanmar.

There was no warning system in the Indian Ocean in 2004 but today a complex network of monitoring stations has reduced warning times.

“It is important that we all know, spread the word and imitate (disasters),” said Indonesian teacher Marziani, who goes by the same name and lost a child in the 2004 tsunami.

“If we had known at that time, the mountain was not far away, we would have run away from it.”

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