Thailand said yesterday charges in a lawsuit filed in the United States that it failed in its duty to warn people about the Indian Ocean tsunami which killed around 300,000 people were groundless.

"Thailand and its government agencies did not fail to perform their duties," Thai Foreign Ministry spokesman Sihasak Phuanketkeow.

"The disaster was a force majeure that could not possibly have been predicted. The tsunami was a phenomenon never experienced before in Thailand," he said.

The December 26 tsunami killed more than 5,300 people in Thailand, more than half of them foreign tourists. Officials said at the time it was the first to hit Thailand in 300 years.

There was no warning before 10-meter walls of water slammed onto Thailand's Andaman Sea coast and islands about 75 minutes after they were generated by the world's biggest earthquake in 40 years off the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

Thai expert Samith Dhammasaroj, now in charge of building a tsunami early warning system, said soon after the tsunami struck there should have been a warning and that he had tried to alert the meteorological department but could not get through.

The head of the department was dismissed.

Suit seeks information

On Friday, US and Austrian lawyers filed a lawsuit demanding Thailand, US forecasters and the French Accor group answer accusations they failed in their duty to warn people a tsunami was coming.

Accor ran the Sofitel resort on Khao Lak beach, the worst hit part of Thailand where most of the country's casualties occurred. The waves wrecked more than two dozen hotels on the beach, including the Sofitel.

Among the charges leveled against Accor was failure to equip its luxury resort and spa in Khao Lak with state-of-the-art seismic detection and warning systems despite its location "in an earthquake and tsunami fault zone."

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of tsunami victims on Friday in a New York district court. The lawyers included US attorney Edward Fagan, famed for 1990s lawsuits against Swiss banks over Holocaust-era accounts.

"We are suing to get information," Austrian lawyer Gerhard Podovsovnik said.

The disaster left about 300,000 people dead or missing in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Maldives, Bangladesh and East Africa. Hundreds of thousands lost their homes.

The lawsuit suggests the Thai government and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which operates a Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii, failed to issue the requisite warnings.

Thai Foreign Ministry spokesman Sihasak said Thailand had moved quickly in responding to the disaster.

"Thailand was not linked to the tsunami warning system in Hawaii. We only share a tsunami website. The Thai government and related agencies are definitely not responsible for any dereliction of duties," he said.

"This should not be an issue for a lawsuit. It would only aggravate a tragedy that requires joint efforts of rebuilding, rehabilitation and prevention."

(China Daily March 9, 2005)