JAKARTA - THE death toll in Indonesia's quake zone is likely to become clear by the middle of the week, the government and aid experts said on Sunday, with estimates ranging from one to five thousand.

There is a huge disparity between those confirmed dead and those believed to have been killed in the crumpled buildings of Padang and in landslides in outlying areas after the 7.6-magnitude quake struck on Wednesday.

The latest data from the national Disaster Management Agency (BPBN) confirm 345 missing and 603 dead, but assessments from the ground indicate the figure is likely to soar when the whole disaster area is taken into account.

Indonesian military spokesman Sagom Tamboen told AFP the army estimated 1,000 people alone in eight buildings they were working on in Padang and the smaller city of Pariaman in West Sumatra had died.

Emergency workers held out scant hope of finding more people alive in the wreckage left by the quake, leaving clean-up teams the grim task of retrieving the decaying bodies of thousands of victims from the rubble. The military and medics pushed deeper into rural areas on Sunday where whole villages have been buried by landslides, and more international rescue teams arrived with sniffer dogs and specialist equipment.

Local rescue officials in isolated villages outside Padang told AFP hundreds were missing in just one landslide that has devastated the villages of Pulau Aie, Lubuk Laweh, Cumanak and Gunung Tiga. The United Nations initially said 1,100 had been killed last week, then said 3,000-4,000 were likely to be trapped and is now reluctant to give figures.

'We'll know more in two or three days,' UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Indonesia El-Mostafa Benlamlih told AFP, adding that the organisation was scaling back its estimates without giving details.

Indonesian Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari told AFP Sunday that the number of confirmed dead was 551 - a smaller figure than the BPBN's estimate - but that the toll 'could reach 3,000'. 'We'll have more solid figures in three to four days' time,' she said.

The head of the International Federation of the Red Cross in Indonesia, Bob McKerrow, said: 'In terms of those that are dead, it's swinging between 1,000 and 5,000. It's a question of people's take on it.'

He thought the final death toll would be about 4,000 based on his experience in other quake zones. -- AFP