Amidst all the stories of heroism and humanity by the relief workers, there are some stories showing that we're a very imperfect species.

Rapists are preying on survivors of Sri Lanka's deadly tsunamis, taking advantage of lax security at refuge centres for those made homeless in the disaster, a women's collective said today.

The group urged authorities to immediately improve security at refuge centres and to establish a means for victims to press charges against their assailants.

"We have received reports of incidents of rape, gang rape, molestation and physical abuse of women and girls in the course of unsupervised rescue operations and while resident in temporary shelters," the Women and Media Collective group said in a statement.

A 12-year-old Swedish boy injured in the tsunami that struck South-East Asia may have been kidnapped from a hospital in Thailand, a Swedish newspaper has reported.

Swedish and Thai police are cooperating to find the boy, Kristian Walker, the Expressen reported.

"Kristian was here in the hospital. He was taken away by a man," the paper quoted Kampongsree Somprutthana, a hospital doctor, as saying.

Kristian's father, Dan Walker, and his grandfather, Daniel Walker, found several witnesses who recognised the boy who mysteriously disappeared from the hospital 30km from Khao Lak, one of Thailand's worst-hit holiday resorts.

The man he may have left with was described as "European-looking, with a moustache and a red shirt".
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The report comes a day after the Swedish branch of non-governmental organisation Save the Children, Raedda Barnen, warned that children who ended up alone after the natural disaster were potential targets for sexual abuse by pedophiles.
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There were already "indications" that surviving children had been sexually abused in Sri Lanka, one of the countries suffering worst from the tsunami, Ms Petri Gornitzka said.

Emails falsely asking for donations for victims of last week's killer tsunami are doing the rounds in Hong Kong.

Police and charity workers said today the fraudulent messages claims to be from Oxfam and urges donors to deposit money into a bank account in Cyprus, they said.

It was not known whether anybody had been fooled by them, a police spokeswoman said.
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Oxfam Hong Kong spokeswoman Christy Ko said the emails were a sick attempt to extort money from people at a time of tragedy.
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"It was a very badly put together email, I don't think many people would have been fooled," she said.

Concerns have been raised in Indonesia that children orphaned by the earthquake and tsunami disaster in Aceh are being taken away by unidentified adults claiming to be relatives, or wanting to adopt them.

North Sumatran authorities have assigned Riza Mutiara, the coordinator of the Medan-based Aceh Sepakat non-governmental organisation, to take care of Acehnese children who lost their parents.

Ms Mutiara says that since refugees began flooding into Medan last Tuesday, about 50 children have been taken away by unidentified people.

Last Friday, Raja, a 5-year-old boy who lost his parents in the earthquake was among hundreds of Acehnese on board a Hercules transport plane that landed at an Air Force base in the North Sumatra provincial capital of Medan, where many have taken refuge.

He has become a focus of attention, his story appearing on the front pages of local newspapers in the past few days.

Soon after his arrival, a couple who claimed to be his parents tried to take him away but they were stopped by Ms Mutiara, who noticed that the couple did not look Acehnese.

Suspicious of their intentions, Ms Mutiara put several questions to them.

The man and woman, who were accompanied by another man who replied to most of Ms Mutiara's questions instead of them, argued they had the right to take custody of the boy.

The conversation soon turned into a quarrel, attracting the attention of a military policeman, who took the couple to his post for questioning.

The man who had accompanied them disappeared.

Under questioning, the couple finally confessed they were not Raja's parents, but claimed they lived next door to his family.

Ms Mutiara suspected that the couple had in fact been paid by someone, perhaps a member of a child-trafficking syndicate, to collect the child.

Tasmanian police have announced an investigation into a website that purported to be collecting donations for the Red Cross tsunami fund and carried a postal address in the Hobart suburb of Glenorchy.

The website, www.incybernet.com, had featured the Red Cross appeal logo, but was inaccessible by late yesterday due to increased web traffic. It claimed to have raised $10,000 for victims of the disaster.

A Red Cross spokesman said the aid group had never heard of Incybernet, nor had the Australian Council for International Development, which maintains a list of all major charities.
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Authorities in Singapore and India warned of hoax mobile phone text messages that claimed a "very dangerous virus" was being spread via seafood in the regions affected by the tsunami.

The message read: "Alert everyone: very dangerous virus, Zulican virus is spreading through seafood. So please avoid eating seafood and pass this message to all of your friends."

But officials said the Zulican virus did not exist and that eating fish in affected regions remained safe.