"More deaths were caused by the tidal wave than the storm itself," minister for relief and resettlement Maung Maung Swe told a news conference in the devastated former capital,  Yangon, where food and water supplies are already running low.

"The wave was up to 3.5 metre high and it swept away and inundated half the houses in low-lying villages," he said, giving the first detailed description of the weekend cyclone. "They did not have anywhere to flee." It is the worst cyclone to hit Asia since 1991, when 143,000 people died in Bangladesh.

Earlier, foreign minister Nyan Win said on state television that 10,000 people had died just in Bogalay, a town 90km southwest of Yangon.

The ruling junta lifted states of emergency in three of the five states and some parts of the worst-hit Yangon and Irrawaddy regions.

After a meeting Myanmar's ambassador to Bangkok, Thai foreign minister Noppadol Pattama said he had been told 30,000 people were missing after Saturday's devastating storm. "The losses have been much greater than we anticipated," he said. Ambassador Ye Win declined to speak to reporters.

The total left homeless by the 190km/hr winds and 3.5 metre storm surge is in the several hundred thou sands, UN aid officials say.

The scale of the disaster in the military-ruled southeast Asian nation drew a rare acceptance of outside help from the diplomatically isolated generals, who spurned such approaches in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Bernard Delpuech, a European Union aid official in Yangon, said the junta had sent three ships carrying food to the delta region, rice bowl for Myanmar's 53 million people. Nearly half the population live in the five disaster-hit states.

US President George W. Bush made a rare personal appeal to Myanmar's junta on Tuesday to accept US disaster teams that have been blocked and said Washington was ready to help more af ter a devastating cyclone. 22,500...