"Two thousand five hundred Burmese people have been killed by the tsunami in Phang Nga province," Moe Swe, the general secretary of the Yaung Chi Oo Workers Association based in western Thailand, told AFP, using Myanmar's former name.

The assessments were based on a one-week series of interviews and information collected on the ground with Myanmar labourers, Thai employers and local villagers, said Moe Swe, whose organisation is based in Mae Sot, a Thai town along the Myanmar border.

A total of 4,000 Myanmar migrants had gone missing, and among them many are now presumed dead, some are believed to have moved to other provinces, and others are thought to have gone back to Myanmar, said Moe Swe, whose group does advocacy work for Myanmar migrants.

A second source, Htoo Chit, coordinator of the Grassroots Human Rights, Education and Development Association based in Kanchanaburi, said the migrant death toll may have reached 3,000.

"According to our last survey, in Ban Naam Khem, Khura Buri and Khao Lak (towns in Phang Nga), 2,500 to 3,000 Burmese people have been killed, and 5,000 to 7,000 have gone missing," Htoo Chit told AFP.

When asked if the Myanmar dead were counted among Thailand's casualty totals, he said that was not known, accusing authorities in the kingdom of paying scant attention to the plight of the migrants.

"They don't care about Burmese people. They are only concerned for the foreigners, for the Westerners, but not for the Burmese," Htoo Chit said.

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, while not responding directly to the NGOs, told a press conference in Bangkok that the death toll among Burmese migrants was "probably about 100."

"Still we cannot identify them because their relatives have not shown up" to claim the bodies or give DNA samples that would help find their relatives, he said.

On Sunday Thailand's confirmed death toll was 5,321, including 1,732 believed to be Thais, 2,173 believed to be foreigners, and 1,416 of unknown national origin.

The number of people reported missing was 3,170, including 1,039 foreigners.

More than 120,000 Myanmar migrants work in Thailand-based fishing crews, in the seafood processing industry, or as farmers and construction workers -- often for one to two dollars per day -- according to Surapong Kongchanthuek of Thailand's committee on human rights for stateless or displaced people.

Late last month he estimated that about 500 people from Myanmar, many of them unregistered fishermen, may have died in the disaster.

Thaksin has stressed his country would spare no effort in identifying as many of the dead as possible, and assured that no discrimination between Thai and foreign corpses was being made.

During a visit to the tourist resort island of Phuket earlier this month, Thaksin told reporters that Myanmar nationals would be treated with compassion and humanitarian assistance like Thais and other nationals.

Thai villagers speaking on condition of anonymity have told AFP that hundreds if not thousands of Myanmar migrants had disappeared from their communities after the tsunamis.

They feared they were either dead, deported, hiding in remote areas out of fear of arrest, or returning to Myanmar on their own.

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