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Muralitharan declared himself "lucky to be alive" after narrowly missing one of the tsunamis that killed 11,000 people in his home country.
The great bowler, recovering from shoulder surgery in Sri Lanka while his teammates toured New Zealand, had spent the weekend in the southern coastal city of Galle handing out cricket bats to underprivileged children with his manager Kushil Gunasekera.
Just minutes after he drove out of the city, Galle was devastated by tidal waves triggered by a massive undersea earthquake thousands of kilometres away in Indonesia. Sri Lanka was the worst hit of several nations stricken by the waves, with nearly 11,000 dead, many missing and hundreds of thousands left homeless.
"I missed the wave by 20 minutes. I had only just left Galle, so I am very lucky to be alive. The wave was over 20 feet (six metres) high and it went two kilometres inland (more than a mile).
A lot of our cricketers are from there and we don't know how their families are. My manager barely survived. His house is gone. Galle is totally under water and a lot of people are missing or dead. There are people everywhere screaming. Something like this has never happened to my country."
One player had lost a relative in the disaster. Sri Lanka observed five days of national mourning declared for the tsunamic victims.
(To be continued).
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