One blackened body after another was pulled from a bar on the tourist island of Bali that only hours earlier had been packed with holidaymakers from around the world when a bomb exploded, killing at least 182 people and injuring hundreds more.
The Sari Club was a mass of smoldering ruins Sunday. Other nightspots around it — discos, restaurants and a hotel — had their roofs blown in and walls smashed. Tourists were fleeing the island fearful of a repeat of the attack, which authorities said was the work of terrorists.
Witnesses described scenes of terror immediately after the explosion in the town of Kuta. Bloodied survivors fled the bar, some with limbs blown off. Cars and motorbikes on the road in front were alight, forming a wall of flames blocking people’s escape.
”Some poor bugger was laying right on the corner and one of his legs was gone. … He was quite coherent, he was just saying, ‘what’s going to happen to me?’,” said Bruce Baker, a tourist from Australia’s Gold Coast. ”I said to him, ‘You’ll be right, mate, someone will come’.”
Another survivor, who was next to the Sari Club at the time of the explosion, said that ”people were fleeing, yelling, screaming, asking for help.” Richard Hechnier (29) from the Australian city of Perth, said the blast was caused by a car bomb. ”I saw people on fire. Many people were carrying others. Most were bleeding. Everything was on fire. It was chaos. It was dark except for the flames,” Hechnier said. He said he later returned to the scene to see if he could help and was horrified by what he saw.
”There were bodies all over the floor of the bar. So many bodies were just black mounds, some were red,” Hechnier said.
An American visitor, Amos Libby (25) who did not say what town he was from, said he was walking past the bar when the explosion happened. ”It lifted me off my feet. All the buildings in the vicinity just collapsed, cars overturned and debris from the buildings fell on them,” he said.
”People I met two to three days ago are never going to go home. I have never seen anything so horrible. There were so many people, 18 to 20 year olds, people in pieces all over the street.”
As daylight broke on the normally tranquil holiday resort, blood still splattered walls and the roadway. A leg was on a nearby roof. A charred hand was on a sidewalk. Shoes and sandals were scattered across a road.
Hundreds of police cordoned off the area. Bomb squad officers were going through the ruins. The blackened remains of dozens of cars and motorbikes cluttered the town’s main road. A few dazed-looking tourists stood by, watching. Most sheltered in their hotels, desperate to get the first plane out. At the airport, tourists sat on the ground hoping to board flights.
”This is the first and last time that I come to Bali,” said Lee Eldred (30) from Kent, England. – Sapa-AP