The death toll from the cyclone disaster that swept the southern Philippines is now above 900, a senior government official said, as cities prepared mass burials for the victims.
Authorities in the port cities of Cagayan de Oro and Iligan, on the island of Mindanao, where sleeping families were swept to sea from coastal slums, said unclaimed bodies piling up in mortuaries were posing health risks and had to be interred.
The head of the government disaster monitoring council said 927 people were now known to have been killed by tropical storm Washi, which brought heavy rains, flash floods and overflowing rivers to Mindanao.
The death toll is expected to rise even further as more floating bodies are recovered, said Benito Ramos, head of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council.
Mr Ramos's latest toll was a sharp increase from the council's previous figures of 662 dead and 82 missing issued just hours earlier. The Philippine Red Cross, which is doing its own tally, reported 713 dead and 563 missing.
"They (the dead bodies) were washed out to sea. They were underwater for the first three days but now, in their state of decomposition, they are bloated and floating to the surface," Mr Ramos told AFP.
"The death toll will rise again (in the morning) when more bodies surface."
The huge death toll came as government relief workers recovered more bodies from Mindanao, particularly Cagayan de Oro and Iligan, which have borne most of the deaths from Washi.
A British national was among those killed by the storm, Britain's Foreign Office said.
Whole villages perched on sandbars or on the shores of rivers were washed away when Washi struck Mindanao and nearby areas over the weekend, bringing a month's worth of rain in a 24-hour period.
The disaster area, located about 800km from the capital Manila, is normally bypassed by typhoons that hit other parts of the Philippines every year.
