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Nine HK residents are still missing from Khao Lak's devastated Sofitel resort

Relatives of  missing Hong Kong residents in Thailand  are beginning to lose hope of finding their loved ones alive, with some flying home to wait for news from the police.

Kinson Lam -  whose elder brother, his wife and their son, were staying in  Khao Lak when the tsunami hit - has been placing missing persons advertisements around the town and in nearby Phuket since arriving last week. He has had no luck in his search for the family.

'We're still thinking of what else we can do, but we are about to leave,' he said last night. 'We really don't know [if we will find them alive], but we are doing as much as possible.'

Lam Kin-chung, 42, Yolanda Ho Siu-ha, 42, and son Marco Lam Man-ngo, 13, were staying at the Sofitel Magic Lagoon Resort and Spa, where three other Hong Kong families or couples were vacationing.

They included Chinese University physics lecturer Dennis Lo Yam-kuen, 48, wife Athena Chan Man-shih, 45, and daughter Lo Chi-ping, 9.

Dr  Lo's elder brother  flew back to Hong Kong last night after picking up some of his brother's clothing from the resort.

'I think the chance [of finding them alive] is very small,' he said. 'There are many Thai and Hong Kong police working here. So there is not much else we can do.'

Before leaving Thailand, Dr Lo's brother left a DNA sample to compare with the victims.

Relatives of fellow Sofitel guests Michelle Leung Ching-hang, 36, and husband Alan Lai Tin-lup, 37, were too upset to speak about their fruitless search but said they were also considering returning to Hong Kong soon.

The only known survivor from the Hong Kong group at the Sofitel resort is Kevin Quinn, a 36-year-old HSBC financial manager  who was spending a four-day break at the beach with his wife.

Mr Quinn suffered leg injuries when the waves washed him from the shore to the second-floor balcony of a hotel room. He became separated from his wife, Rachel Quinn, 34,  and has not seen her since.

Elder brother Gareth Quinn said the family had decided to leave the search for Rachel Quinn to the police after searching among the area's temporary morgues.

The Sofitel resort had been open for only three months when the tsunami hit. The open-air lobby has now been turned into a makeshift control centre for international rescue teams from Japan, Greece, France and Singapore.

The teams have been digging through sand and debris inside hotel rooms  for  survivors. But in the past few days they have found only corpses.

They located  up to 80 bodies a day at the hotel  in the past week, but  only eight were found on Sunday and none had been found by yesterday afternoon.  All the bodies from Khao Lak,  the worst-hit area in Thailand, have been sent to the  nearby temples where  photographs are taken and DNA samples extracted.

Most of the bodies are bloated and decayed beyond recognition, with even the race of the victim difficult to determine. Workers at the temples said yesterday 1,500 bodies had been photographed and packed into temporary refrigeration containers.  There were still 3,000 bodies that needed to go through that process.

Given the previous experience of the Bali bombing, in which it took five months to identify about 200 corpses, one Swedish rescue worker said it could take more than a year before all the bodies could be identified. Kerry Hooper, a volunteer at a temple, said: 'There's just nothing families can do. Nobody has been able to identify a body. Today only two families came. They're running out of hope.'



Families filter home as search hopes fade