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  Date / Time: 10/1/2009 6:38 PM UTC

  Earthquakes across Asia Pacific cause two disasters in under 24 hours
  

  The boy, who has not been named, is among 119 confirmed victims of tsunami up to 35ft high that tore through the South Pacific islands of Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga leaving communities in ruins.

  The giant wave was caused by a tremor with a magnitude of 8.3, that struck about 120 miles from American Samoa, a US territory, at 5.48pm GMT on Tuesday.

   

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  In Indonesia, at least 450 are confirmed dead and thousands more missing or trapped in rubble after two earthquakes that hit less than 24 hours later. Officials have said the death toll on the island of Sumatra will "definitely" rise.

  The first Indonesia earthquake, magnitude 7.6, struck at 10.16am GMT on Wednesday, some 55 miles under the sea north-west of the city of Padang. It was followed by a second tremor, magnitude 6.8, that hit at 1.52am GMT today about 150 miles further south-east.

  Stephen Rogers, the British honorary consul in Samoa, said the entire island had been shaken by the initial earthquake.

  "It was a very big earthquake and the tsunami came about 20 to 30 minutes later," said Dr Rogers. "It took anything in its path. Roads have been pretty much washed away. Houses have been washed away or knocked down."

  The boy thought dead in Samoa was on a beach with his parents when he was swept out to sea early on Tuesday.

  A spokesman for the British High Commission in New Zealand said the boy was a New Zealand citizen, although his parents were Britons.

  The couple are understood to have emigrated to New Zealand where the boy was born and were holidaying on the island when the massive wave hit.

  Buildings were flattened and cars swept away from dozens of villages, while a large boat also left washed up alongside a road.

  British officials in the region said there were no further reports of UK casualties and that most Britons known to be on the islands at the time of the tsunami had now been traced.

  Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the Queen spoke of their sadness at the deaths.

  British aid is being sent to areas of western Indonesia, where the tremors have caused widespread landslides and at least two hospitals, mosques and hotels to collapse.

  In Padang – home to nearly a million people – residents fought some fires with buckets of water and used their bare hands to search for survivors, pulling at the wreckage and tossing it away piece by piece.

  Jusuf Kalla, vice-president of Indonesia, said the death toll was "definitely higher" than initial reports received by the government.

  "It's hard to tell because there is heavy rain and a blackout," he said.

  Siti Fadilah Supari, the country's health minister, confirmed that two hospitals and a mall collapsed in Padang.

  "This is a high-scale disaster, more powerful than the earthquake in Yogyakarta in 2006 when more than 3,000 people died," the minister said, referring to a major city on the main Indonesian island of Java.

  Stocks of emergency shelters, hygiene kits and clothing are ready to be distributed by aid teams funded by British charity Oxfam once workers can get through to the worst affected areas.

  The British Red Cross has launched a fund-raising appeal to help those caught up in both the earthquake and the tsunami.

  Padang lies on the same fault line as Indonesia's Aceh province, which was devastated in the 2004 tsunami with 130,000 dead.

  Experts are trying to determine whether the quake was linked to the one earlier in the South Pacific.

  The two Samoan islands and Tonga, which have a combined population of about 350,000, have grown in popularity as tourist destinations in recent years, despite their vulnerability to natural disasters

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