A global warning system could have lowered the catastrophic death toll from the recent Asian tsunami,Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi said on Monday.

Ciampi was speaking in Italian southern city Positano after meeting with Marilu' Attanasio, a shopkeeper who was among the lucky few to emerge from the incoming wall of water at Phuket, Thailand, on December 26.

"From what the lady told me, the tidal wave struck two hours after the earthquake.If there had been an effective global warningsystem, it would have been enough to climb the nearby hills to save yourself," Ciampi told reporters.

Most of the 18 verified Italian dead lost their lives in Phuketand in Sri Lanka.

The two locations are also where the majority of the 570 missing Italians are being sought.

Speaking at the weekend, Italian Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini said that it will be impossible to recover the bodies of all those who lost their lives.

Nevertheless, he stressed, Italy will do all it can to help those families which ask to have DNA tests performed in order to definitively identify their loved ones.

Fini went on to reiterate his appeal to relatives of those missing in Southest Asia not to travel to places like Phuket because "the situation there is very difficult."

The preliminary death toll from the tsunami, triggered by a 9.0magnitude earthquake off Indonesia, now stands at 144,887 people,over 7,000 of them Europeans.