KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 3 (AFP) - Malaysia has opened its airspace and two airports to US and UN relief operations for the tsunami-hit Indonesian province of Aceh, the foreign ministry said Monday.
The UN World Food Programme would use an airport in Subang, a suburb outside the capital Kuala Lumpur, as a base to forward relief supplies to Aceh, the ministry said in a statement carried by Bernama news agency.
The United States has been permitted to use the Langkawi International Airport in the north to send humanitarian aid to Aceh, which bore the brunt of Sunday's disaster, it said.
Malaysia has also deployed aircraft and helicopters to help Indonesia transport supplies and tsunami victims from Aceh, it said.
Malaysia's confirmed death toll in the disaster climbed to 68 Sunday after a two-year-old girl and a 57-year-old woman died in hospital from injuries sustained when the tsunamis hit northern Kedah state, police said.
The giant waves, spawned by a massive earthquake off Indonesia on December 26, hit shorelines across the Indian Ocean, killing more than 144,000 people, about 94,000 of them in Indonesia.
Eight Malaysians were reported to still be missing by late Sunday, including four in Phuket in Thailand, three in Aceh and one in Madras in India.
While Malaysia lies closer to the epicentre of the earthquake than many countries harder hit, it was protected from the full force of the waves by Indonesia's Sumatra island.
The National Union of Tamil School Teachers here has urged schools, teacher training colleges and universities to introduce lessons on natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis, to prepare Malaysians for such eventualities, Bernama said.
"Despite tsunamis being in the news for the past 40 years when they hit Japanese islands, we don't have that vocabulary in our school subjects," said adviser Shahul Hamid Mydin Shah.
"It's high time we include them and other natural disasters so that we will be better prepared in the future."
01/03/2005 04:12 GMT - AFP