A Sussex girl named as one of the dead in the Australian hostel blaze has phoned home to say she is alive and well.

Television, radio and newspapers across the world have been forced to broadcast and publish embarrassed corrections today saying Nicola Morgan, from West Sussex, is not one of the dead.

GMTV's This Morning programme was one of the programmes forced to broadcast a correction after her furious father phoned the station.

Nicola, in her twenties, was one of those who escaped the blaze at the hostel in Childers, Queensland, which claimed the lives of 15 backpackers, including several from Britain.

She and her family were furious when her name was given as one of the dead and published in an Australian newspaper.

Nicola had telephoned home immediately after escaping from the fire to say she was alive and well.

When a local newspaper in Australia published her name as one of the dead, she went to the police in Childers with the paper, saying: "That's me. I am not dead."

A spokesman for Australia's Channel 7 News, which fed GMTV with reports of the tragedy, said: "We took the name of Nicola Morgan from West Sussex from a list published in the local media."

Queensland police had not issued Nicola's name as one of the dead and neither had the Foreign Office in Britain.

A spokesman for the Foreign Office said today: "We were not involved as her name was not on any of our lists. We knew she had contacted her family in West Sussex and we knew she was safe."

Another Sussex survivor at The Palace backpackers hostel was student Martin Cockhill, of Springfield Road, Hastings. He lost everything, including his passport, clothes and money.