The Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami on Dec. 26 killed at least 123,071 people in Aceh province on Sumatra island, according to the Indonesian government.

A total of 113,937 were missing, and nearly 401,000 were made homeless, the latest government data show.

Elsewhere, about 38,000 people were killed in Sri Lanka, 11,000 in India and 5,400 in Thailand. People in Malaysia, the Maldives, Myanmar, Bangladesh and East Africa also died.

The Indonesian government estimated the death toll at tens of thousands higher at one point, but then changed its counting system to register as killed only those whose bodies had been recovered from the mud and rubble.

Most of the bodies retrieved remain unidentified and are buried in mass graves.

"In Banda Aceh and Aceh Besar we have reached 90 percent of the areas" where bodies were expected to be found, Eka Susilo of the Indonesian Red Cross Retrieval Unit told reporters, speaking of areas he said had especially large numbers of victims.

The Red Cross is coordinating the recovery effort.

Susilo said the group had a target for finishing the work by the end of February, although it might continue into March. If so, he added, "you can be sure the numbers of bodies will not be in the big figures, maybe less than a hundred" a day.

In the days immediately after the tsunami that flattened huge sections of the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, and other coastal cities, towns and villages, as many as 5,000 bodies were recovered on some days, but the daily figure has dwindled toward the low hundreds.

Unclear is how many of the bodies fished out of rivers, dug out of mud, pulled from ruined buildings, or simply picked up from the streets overlap with the number of missing. Government officials have been reluctant to speculate.

A standard qualification in the daily statistics says only: "It is believed that some of those previously thought missing are confirmed dead, are among the (displaced), or have left (Aceh)".

Asked his view of how to interpret the figures on the missing, Susilo said there were different theories, but added: "Our job is just to evacuate the dead bodies ... We are not competent to answer the issue."

He also said he was unable to project how many bodies would ultimately be recovered.