At least 48 dead and hundreds missing after tsunami smashes into tourist city in Indonesia

At least 48 people have been killed and hundreds more are missing after a devastating tsunami hit Indonesia.

The fate of hundreds of revellers who were attending a beach festival is unknown in the tourist town of Palu.

Strong aftershocks have rocked the area this morning as Indonesia’s disaster agency begin to take stock of the disaster.

Agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said so far 48 people are known to have died but bodies are still washing up on the shoreline.

The death toll is expected to rise dramatically.

The tsunami which smashed into the coastal city of Palu, the capital of Central Sulawesi province, was triggered by a 7.5 magnitude earthquake on land.

Video footage shows people screaming and running for their lives as the giant waves hit.

Mr Nugroho said thousands of homes, hospitals, shopping malls and hotels have been washed away.

A large bridge spanning a coastal river also collapsed.

Bodies of victims trapped in the rubble are also being found and at least 350 people have been injured.

Dozens of injured people are being treated in makeshift medical tents set up outdoors.

The military is planning to send cargo planes from the capital Jakarta carrying relief aid but Palu airport is currently closed.

Indonesia’s meteorological and geophysics agency BMKG had issued a tsunami warning after the quake.

However they lifted it 34 minutes later.

Numerous strong aftershocks followed, including one with a magnitude of 6.7.

The city of Palu was hit alongside a smaller city Donggala.

Power outages mean there is little information coming out of Donggala, which was just 16 miles from the epicentre of the quake.

More than 600,000 people live in the cities of Palu and Donggala.

Indonesia sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire – an arc of volcanoes and fault lines – and is regularly hit by earthquakes.

In August, a series of major quakes killed over 500 people in the tourist island of Lombok and destroyed dozens of villages along its northern coast.

The most devastating tsunami to hit the region came in December 2004 when a massive magnitude 9.1 earthquake off Sumatra in western Indonesia triggered a tsunami that killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries.