Bali: Survivor tells of horror

2005-10-02 17:45

Bali - Amid screams of "Allah, Allah, help!" the waiter - knocked down by a bomb blast at Bali's beachside Cafe Menega - got up near a table where five children had been sitting.

"One woman rushed to pick up her child, but the little girl was already dead," 23-year-old Balinese native Wayan Subagia told the Associated Press.

He said he saw the explosion 5m away, but suspected the bomb had been buried in the sand "because I did not see any package or anyone ... place a bomb".

But a head and feet were all that remained of the suicide bomber who attacked the cafe, and two other attackers who blew themselves up at other tourist spots on Bali on Saturday evening in co-ordinated attacks that killed at least 26 people, an investigator said.

Chaos

Subagia got up, but recalls blacking out before hearing the second blast.

As it was a clear night, he could see the mostly Indonesian guests from his restaurant running down the beach toward the waves for safety. There was chaos.

"Adults picking up children - there was bleeding every where," he said.

He eventually pulled himself together and responded to somebody's cry for help.

"I pulled them towards the parking area. Then I just started to cry," he said.

At a nearby restaurant, Madelaine Chan, a 26-year-old sales manager from Singapore, said no-one around her was sure what had happened after the first blast.

About five minutes later, a second explosion went off at Cafe Nyoman, 30m away from where Chan was having dinner.

"We saw red sparks went off, then it just gray smoke everywhere," she told the AP.

Beach

"Everybody was running to the beach. We thought it was the was the safest place then," she said.

Survivors, alone or in pairs, carried away limp victims covered with blood and sand. One man draped a woman's purse around her leg as he carried her to safety.

After taking a guest to safety, Subagia drove his motorbike to the Bali international medical centre.

He was hurt by flying pieces of metals, and was temporarily deaf in his left ear.

The next day, Bobby Nugroho went to the morgue in Sanglah hospital to collect the remains of his mother and father.

"A witness said that my father was sitting facing the beach when a man opened his jacket and pulled the trigger in front of him," Nugroho, an Indonesian in his late 20s, told the AP.

Nugroho, a Jakarta-based reporter with the Japanese newspaper Nihon Keizan Shimbun, spent the day doing paperwork so he could take the remains of his parents to Jakarta.

They had gone to the vacation paradise for a weeklong vacation, he said.

"I can only now accept our fate," he said.

- AP