A survivor of the tsunami in Thailand has spoken of his anguish after he was forced to push away a pregnant woman who was clinging desperately to him.
Briton Andrew Keith, 35, says he is haunted by the moment he prised the woman's arms from around his neck to stop them both drowning as they were churned around in the water.
Speaking of his ordeal as he recovered from a broken leg, the expatriate merchandising manager, who lives in Hong Kong, said: "There was nothing I could have done to save her."
The body of Thisbe Ander, a newlywed Swedish tourist, was later found washed up in a mangrove swamp with her husband Thomas.
Keith and the Swedish couple were hit by the tidal wave at the Golden Buddha Beach resort on Pra Thong island in Thailand, where he has a holiday home.
Recalling the drama, he said: "There was this huge noise like a plane. We ran to the beach and saw that a wave had broken and was racing back out to sea. It had broken very high.
"Suddenly it was coming at us very, very fast and people started running and telling us to get on to higher ground.
"I jumped up on to a rock and a young Swedish couple were coming across the beach towards me. I told them to get to the high ground and they stumbled up on to the rock just as the wave struck.
"There were two waves that came together and we were caught in the vortex of these. It was like being in a huge washing machine.
"We were swept off the rock and the woman put her arms around my neck. She was very panicked and very scared.
"As we went under the water, she started to tighten her grip. We were going further and further down. We were being tumbled over and over.
"As the pressure of the water got more intense, her grip just kept getting tighter and tighter around my neck. I realized I was drowning -- we were both drowning -- and needed to get to the surface.
"If I didn't do something we would both be dead. I thought if I could break her grip we might both have a chance.
"I had to fight her off. It was pretty difficult. I was pulling her arms off from around my neck. Eventually she let go and I never saw her again after that.
The bodies of Thisbe and her husband Thomas, who were on honeymoon, were found with five other people from the Golden Buddha Beach resort in the days after the tsunami.
A total of 13 guests, homeowners and Thai staff died at the resort. Scores more people from the island's three fishing villages were swept away to their deaths.
Keith, who has lived in Hong Kong for 10 years and works for upmarket department store Lane Crawford, said: "I have really found it difficult to deal with what happened.
"It has played very heavily on my mind. But there wasn't anything I could do. Even if we had managed to get to the surface there wasn't anywhere I could have taken her."
When he resurfaced, the raging sea swept Andrew inland into a mangrove swamp, and minutes later smashed him into a tree and dragged him back underwater where his leg was trapped in tree roots.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema