Hurricane Felix Death Toll Hits 130 in Nicaragua

The death toll from Hurricane Felix, which tore into the Nicaragua-Honduras border area this week, has jumped to about 130, a Nicaraguan rescue official said on Friday.

About 70 people still were believed missing after high waves drowned fishermen and battered coastal villages, civil defense official Fabio Benedic said.

"We have around 130 corpses listed," he said.

The dead were mainly Nicaraguan Miskito Indians, including some fishermen whose bodies washed up in Honduras.

Hundreds of people were unable to evacuate before the storm and had only their flimsy wooden shacks for shelter. Some tied themselves to trees or boats in a bid to withstand Felix's 160 mph (256 kph) winds, local fisherman said.

A motor boat loaded with some 10 dead bodies was found floating in the sea arrived at the port of Puerto Cabezas on Thursday evening. Villagers looked on in tears.

President Daniel Ortega visited Nicaragua's debris-strewn northern coast on Friday as a U.S. Navy ship, U.S. helicopters and a planeload of Venezuelan food aid arrived to help.

Felix brought back memories of Hurricane Mitch, which killed 10,000 people in Central America in 1998, when it struck the region's Caribbean coast on Tuesday as a monster Category 5 storm, smashing thousands of wooden homes.

It mainly hit the turtle-fishing Miskito Indians who live cut off from the world in sparsely populated marshlands dotted with lagoons and crocodile-infested rivers on the coasts of Nicaragua and Honduras.