Costa Rica mourns 10 hurricane deaths

San Jose: Flags dropped to half-mast in Costa Rica on Monday at the start of three days of mourning for 10 people killed in a hurricane that struck late last week.

The grieving decreed by the government came as the north of the country slowly got back to normal after the passage last Thursday of Hurricane Otto, which affected 449 towns and villages, some of which were flooded.

The death toll rose to 10 after the identification on Sunday of another body. An unspecified number of people remain missing.

Some 5,500 people remain in shelters, where diarrhea has emerged as a problem, according to the National Commission for Emergencies.

Otto blew in from the Caribbean on Thursday, hitting land in a sparsely inhabited part of Nicaragua, where no deaths were reported. It then crossed into a rural northern part of Costa Rica, losing strength and becoming a tropical storm as it exited into the Pacific.