Archives

JAKARTA, Sunday (AFP)

Charred and limbless bodies were strewn across the road as terrified foreign tourists, some with clothes on fire and drenched in blood, stumbled through the carnage of the Bali blast. In seconds the bustling nightspots in the popular Legian resort on Saturday night were transformed into an inferno which left at least 100 people dead and many more injured.

The bomb erupted at 11:00 p.m. just as the nightclubs were beginning to fill up, and the restaurants and roads were brimming with people eating or strolling. "I was sitting at a table about 100 metres (yards) away when there was a mild explosion followed three or four seconds later by a very powerful one. I hurled myself to the ground," said Karim Ansel, 27, from Paris.

"Everybody was shouting and screaming, there was dust all over the place. Somebody asked me if an aeroplane had fallen on top of us," a shocked Ansel, who arrived in Bali on holiday 10 days ago, told AFP.

"As I came out I saw awful, awful things. One person was absolutely covered in blood, another woman was running with her clothes burned onto her body.

"A man was dressed only in his underpants and covered in blood, with his shoes in his hands. Other people were just completely traumatised." Ansel said most of those injured were foreign tourists, although some local taxi drivers and parking attendants were hurt.

The explosion completely destroyed two nightclubs and many surrounding shops, blowing out windows in a 500-metre (yard) radius.

"There are charred and mangled bodies everywhere, it is unbelievable," said French photographer Cyril Terrien at the scene. "I have never seen such an appalling thing in my life."

"It is still burning. From where I was, I saw burned and mutilated bodies, this is really difficult to describe. The bodies of Indonesians and foreigners are lying side by side.

"People are stumbling around in the road as if they are in a trance. There were many people in this place because the Sari Club was one of the most popular nightspots here," said Terrien.

He said the local rescue services were totally overwhelmed by the scale of the carnage and struggled to ferry the injured to hospital around 15 kilometres (nine miles) away in the Bali capital Denpasar.

Ansel said hundreds of tourists fled their hotel rooms and spent the night on the beach with their belongings. Others camped out in hotel lobbies.

Australian tourist Rachael Hughes, 18, said she and her boyfriend had just arrived when the blast occurred, smashing the window of their hotel room.

"Standing in the foyer of the Bounty Hotel, people were just walking in, blood dripping off them, burns to their face, skin coming off them.

"It was really a terrible sight. You could just hear people crying up in the Bounty foyer - obviously they have lost loved ones or friends."

The blaze was still burning fiercely as the sun rose on the shell-shocked island, which had until now managed to escape the violence that has wracked Indonesia since the fall of dictator Suharto in 1998.

The authorities on the island were now bracing for an exodus of tourists.

"I am going to the airport. I want to take the first flight out, I can't stay here any more," said Ansel.

Meanwhile Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said

Several Australians were among the 60 people killed when a blast ripped through a nightclub on the Indonesian island of Bali.

"It is almost certain that several Australians will have been killed," Downer told a commercial television station. Downer said an estimated 40 Australians were in hospital, about 15 of them in serious condition, after being hurt in the blast.

It was feared that eight members of a Perth football club were among the casualties as they remained unaccounted for following the explosion, the team coach said.

Simon Quayle, coach of the Kingsley Football Club, said club members only arrived in Bali Sunday evening and many had gone to the packed Sari nightclub. Downer said he believed the Sari had been targeted by terrorists because it was popular with Australians.

"I am almost certain this was a terrorist attack," he said. But an Australian living in Bali quoted eyewitnesses as challenging this view, saying the blast most likely involved LPG cooking gas canisters.

"This is definitely not a bomb, this is an explosion of an LPG cylinder," Mark Taylor, a freelance cameraman working in Bali, told Sky News.

"Eyewitnesses who were there say that there were two explosions about 30 seconds apart, which makes sense - one bottle's gone up first then the rest of the bottles have gone up after it," Taylor said.

Taylor also expressed doubt that a second explosion near the US honorary consulate in the same area was part of a terrorist attack.

"This second blast near the US consulate is not a blast at all, it looks to me like a car accident ... it's not a blast it's not a bomb at all," he said. "It's also four or five hundred metres away from the American consulate office, and it's only a remote office it's not a fully-fledged American embassy or consulate, it's a remote office," he said.

Meanwhile Australia rushed medical help and offered police help to Indonesia

Downer said a Royal Australian Air Force medical assistance and evacuation team was on its way to Bali to assist hospitals on the island which have been swamped with injured.

"We will also be able to take people out of Bali and take them to hospitals in Australia," he said.

Australian diplomatic officers were also en route for the scene and Canberra has offered to send investigators from its intelligence agency (ASIO) and police to help determine who was behind the explosion.

"We are offering to send an Australian Federal Police/ASIO team to Bali to assist the Indonesians with their inquiries but we won't know until the next day or so whether they will accept that offer," he said.

Downer said he believed the double explosions at the Sari nightclub and a US consular facility elsewhere in Bali overnight pointed to a terrorist attack.

"In those circumstances it does look like a coordinated attack against so-called foreign interests," he said.

News | Business | Features | Editorial | Security
Politics | World | Letters | Sports | Obituaries |

Produced by Lake House
Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
Comments and suggestions to :Web Manager