At least 502 people have been killed and hundreds missing following torrential rains and flooding in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, civil defense officials said.

At least 358 people were killed in Haiti, while another 144 people died in the Dominican Republic, officials said.

The two countries form the mountainous island of Hispaniola, which bore the brunt of 10 days of heavy rain storms across much of the Caribbean.

Rescuers desperately searched for survivors in the Dominican border town of Jimani after a raging river

Carrying away scores of sleeping women, children and men in the middle of the night.

Dominican authorities said more than 13,000 people had been left homeless after swollen rivers turned into torrents.

The Soleil River burst its banks in the early hours of Monday, sweeping away whole households.

Swollen, mud-caked bodies, many of them naked children, were piled in the local morgue as grief-stricken relatives wept, television images showed.

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Dorka Dotel lost her four children. "This is a terrible blow, terrible, they are all gone," she wept.

Here is a map of the world (Haiti is circled below).

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