The Nepal Tourist Board has said the number of people missing following the floods has risen from 384 to 403, with 33 UK citizens among 341 foreign nationals unaccounted for.
Search for missing Britons
The desperate search for missing tourists in Nepal, including 33 Brits, will rightly command attention in Britain. Families at home will be enduring an unbearable wait for news.
But this catastrophe must be seen in its full, terrible scale. At least 95 people are already known to have died after a wall of water, mud and debris tore through communities near the Tibetan border.
Wider devastation
Hundreds more are missing, among them police officers, soldiers and power workers who were serving local people. Behind every statistic is a family shattered, a home destroyed, a livelihood washed away.
One survivor has told how she watched members of her family being swept away before escaping with her son to a rooftop. There are also deaths and hundreds missing across the border in Tibet.
Britain will hope and pray for its citizens. We must also spare equal thought for the thousands of local people whose lives have been devastated in minutes.
