REUTERS, Saturday October 12, 2002 07:39 PM ET
Fifty-Eight Dead, Mostly Foreigners, in Bali
BALI, Indonesia (Reuters) - At least 58 people, most of them foreign tourists, were
killed and over 120 wounded in a wave of bomb attacks on revelers on Indonesia's
resort island of Bali Saturday night, officials said.
Police said there had been three blasts, two at nightclubs in the heart of the main
Kuta Beach tourist area and one at Sanur, near a U.S. honorary consulate. An officer
said they had occurred simultaneously at around 11:30 p.m. (11:30 a.m. EDT).
In the early morning hours of Sunday flames licked into the air around what was left of
the worst-hit Sari nightclub in Kuta Beach, as police and tourists carried victims away
from the carnage, many half-naked and moaning in pain.
Many victims remained pinned under rubble.
Bali police spokesman Yatim Suyatmo said police believed all the explosive devices
were homemade bombs.
A local photographer said windows on shops had been blown out up to 500 yards
away from the Sari nightclub, and that the blast had wrecked up to 15 cars and been
heard many miles away. "The Sari club is gone. You can smell the bodies of those
who died," he said.
A police officer who declined to be identified said: "It's difficult to identify people
because they have been completely charred."
A hospital spokeswoman said: "There are 58 dead, and in all we have identified seven
Indonesians."
There were at least 129 badly and lightly wounded.
One police official said the dead included Australians, British, Canadians and French,
and there were unconfirmed reports of Norwegian victims.
CONSULATE BLAST
A U.S. embassy spokeswoman said no one had been hurt in the third explosion,
which occurred 50 meters (yards) from the honorary U.S. consulate in Sanur, another
tourist area about 30 minutes from Kuta.
She said one of the other blasts had been caused by a car bomb, though police said
they had not yet established this.
The blasts at a time of growing security concern in the world's most populous Muslim
nation following terror threats.
Bali is Indonesia's most popular tourist destination, and a favorite for Australians and
Japanese. Although the country as a whole is 85 percent Muslim, Bali is
majority-Hindu.
While a number of regions in Indonesia, and the capital Jakarta, have been hit by
violence in recent years, Bali had long been considered a safe haven and spared from
any unrest.
"This is a major incident, in terms of the loss of life and the fact that, unless the
information changes, it looks like a premeditated attack," a foreign risk consultant in
Jakarta said.
The consultant, who declined to be identified, said the effect would be serious for
Indonesia. "The impact on Bali will be major. Look at the large number of foreigners in
this."
SATURDAY NIGHT REVELLERS
The tourists had been reveling on a typical Saturday night in Kuta Beach .
The blast at the Sari club left a hole five 5 feet deep and 12 by 15 feet in area, police
said.
The photographer said: "I saw one man, who looked Indonesian, whose head had
been blown off."
Richard Poore, a 37-year-old visitor from New Zealand who works as a television
presentation director, told Reuters he had started to film the scene:
"I saw limbs lying on the ground, I got to the stage where I couldn't film anymore
because it made me feel physically ill. I've never seen anything like it in 12 years of
reporting."
He said he had tried to enter the Sari club about 20 minutes before the explosion but
had been unable to get in because it was too busy, with hundreds inside.
Another tourist said many terrified tourists had left their hotel rooms to sleep in open
areas or on the beach. Many were getting ready to leave Bali on the first available
flights.
The British Foreign Ministry said there were nine Britons among the wounded, but
none so far listed among those killed. The embassy spokeswoman had no details on
whether any Americans had died.
Police denied an earlier report that an explosion had gone off in Ubud, another popular
tourist town on the island.
Some critics say Indonesia is the weakest link in the U.S.-led war on terror in
Southeast Asia, partly because the government has concerns about cracking down
on radical Muslim groups for fear of upsetting the vast moderate mainstream.
Earlier Saturday evening, a suspected homemade bomb had exploded in the front
yard of the Philippine consulate in the Indonesian city of Manado, causing some
damage but no casualties in an attack that officials blamed on terrorists.
The explosion blew out the windows of the two-story consulate and knocked over the
gate of the compound.
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