Achai Saw Hlaing, a Myanmar labourer with a valid Thai work permit, was the sole survivor from a hotel building site on the beach at Khao Lak which was swept away by the tsunamis on December 26.

Unlike his 10 companions, 43-year-old Hlaing managed to climb on top of a roof and avoid the giant killer waves.

When the sea subsided, he hid in a slum 10 kilometres (six miles) from Khao Lak, his home for eight years, bundled together with 100 compatriots.

"The Thai authorities did not even come and ask how many Myanmar nationals were dead," said Hlaing, a grim picture of skin and bones with hollowed cheeks and bloodshot eyes.

"They made lists of the Thai dead, of foreigners, but did not give a damn about Myanmar," he said.

"Even though my papers were in order, I dared not go to the police for fear they would arrest me."

Next to him, a woman from Myanmar told how she lost her daughter in the catastrophe. Someone said to her the next day that the girl's body was lying on the beach but she said the Thai police stopped her from going to look.

The corpse had probably been dispatched to the morgue next to the temple at Yanyao further south, she said.

Myanmar non-governmental organisations (NGOs) based in Thailand said that thousands of migrant workers in the fishing and construction industries in the area were killed by the tsunamis and thousands more were missing.

A total of 2,500 people from Myanmar were 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.

And 4,000 Myanmar migrants had gone missing, and among them many were presumed dead, he said. 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.

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, with between 5,000 and 7,000 missing.

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, the organisations said.

The NGOs were unable to say immediately if the Myanmar dead were counted among Thailand's official casualty total of 8,500 dead or missing.

But there was little chance that the Myanmar victims would ever be recognised as such, they said.

"The military government in Myanmar does not even care about Burmese people in Burma," said Myint Myint San, a member of the Burmese Women Union NGO based in Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. Myanmar was formerly called Burma.

"They will not claim their nationals," she said. "They consider these people (as) having left their country."

As for Thailand, "they know they have hundreds of thousands of Burmese migrant workers. Thailand should at least acknowledge that a lot of Burmese nationals have disappeared."

For example, "a Thai employer told us in Khao Lak that half of his 150 workers are missing," she said.

And on Ko Khao island off the nearby coast at Takua Pa, "there were 10,000 Burmese workers. So far, we were able to locate 300 among them," she said.

According to the NGOs, some 900,000 Myanmar nationals work legally in the whole of Thailand, mainly in the fishing and construction industry.

In Phang Nga, migrant workers from Myanmar had been profiting from the tourist boom of the past two or three years.

"But these (Myanmar) people, dead or not, do not exist, they are invisible," said Myint Myint.

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