Posted on 10/13/2002 4:16:41 PM PDT by united1000
October 14 2002
More than 200 Australians remain unaccounted for following yesterday's devastating terrorist blast in Bali, a spokesman for Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said today.
The spokesman said commercial airlines were putting extra flights to bring home Australian tourists while further RAAF C-130 aircraft carrying injured would arrive in Darwin this morning.
"The death toll overall is believed to be in excess of 180. We understand that 13 Australians have died, although those figures are fluid," he told AAP.
"The department is working to clarify those numbers as the situation stabilises. There is believed to be 110 Australians injured and a further 220 unaccounted for at this stage."
The spokesman said Australian officials were working closely with Indonesian authorities.
He said the Australian Consulate-General in Bali had organised one medical evacuation of five of the most critically injured who arrived in Perth early this morning aboard a BAC-111 aircraft.
The Australian Defence Force had deployed five C-130 aircraft with medical teams to transport patients from Bali.
The first landed in Darwin this morning with 15 on board, one of whom died en route.
A second C-130 is expected in Darwin later this morning with 22 on board.
The spokesman said Garuda had put on an an additional two flights from Bali today while Qantas had scheduled three extra flights to Sydney today and one to Perth tomorrow.
Australian victim dies on flight to Darwin
One of the first 15 injured Australians flown by the RAAF from Bali after a suspected terrorist bomb blast died en route to Darwin today.
The Hercules left Denpasar last night only half full of casualties because some of the victims were too ill to delay take-off until more arrived, a defence spokesman said.
More than 24 hours after a bomb destroyed two bars in Kuta, a victim died during the three-hour flight to Darwin.
The plane touched down at 1.45am CST (0215 AEST) at Darwin airport where nine ambulances and an ambulance bus were ready to take them to the Royal Darwin Hospital.
The mostly young patients, all of them burn victims, were carried, pushed in wheelchairs or walked unaided across the tarmac.
"I can tell you the first 15 victims of the tragedy have arrived and sadly one of those died in transit," hospital medical superintendent Len Notaras told media shortly after the victims arrived.
As many as four were in critical conditions while six or seven would be well enough to go home within days.
With up to 100 victims expected to be flown by the RAAF to the hospital in about 12 hours, Dr Notaras said the first arrivals were not the worst injured.
"We expect that there are still some very serious cases to come," he said.
The 11 men and three women were all Australians, coming from states including Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia.
Future medical evacuations were expected to also include American, Canadian and New Zealand patients.
Many of the patients appeared stunned as they were ferried to the hospital.
Their injuries included fractured limbs, shrapnel wounds and impaling on wood and glass.
"The sheer magnitude of what has actually occurred is going to take some considerable time to sink in for a lot of people including ourselves at the hospital," Dr Notaras said.
"It has been our own, in a sense, 11th of September; it's a tragedy."
A man, who gave only his first name, Mick, waited at the airport fence for hours hoping to glimpse his mate, a 25-year-old father of two, among the injured.
His mate, a Top End station hand who he would name only as Wayne, had gone to Bali on Friday for a four-day break with friends.
"Even if he gets carried off a plane on a stretcher, he's here. I just want to find him," Mick said.
The next Hercules was due at 6.40am CST (0710 AEST).
Federal police and ASIO team head to Bali
Australian Federal Police and a team from ASIO flew to Bali to help Indonesians investigate the bombing, which experts believe to be the work of Indonesian terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
Federal cabinet's national security committee will meet this morning to discuss Australia's response to the attack.
Prime Minister John Howard said Australia would take a measured response.
"It is not an occasion for hot headed responses, but certainly not an occasion to imagine that if you roll yourself up into a little ball all these horrible things will go away," he told Channel Nine.
George Bush condemns attack as cowardly
International leaders condemned the attack and US President George Bush offered help to Indonesia to investigate the attack, and called it "a cowardly act designed to create terror and chaos".
More accounts of the victims emerged this morning, with friends telling how five members of Sydney's Coogee Wombats rugby league team had died in the blast at the Sari and Padi nightclubs in Kuta.
Australian tells of five teammates dying
Australian Brett Patterson told today of how five members of the Coogee Wombats rugby league team died in the blast - while others missed death by seconds.
Mr Patterson, who was travelling with the players from Sydney, said 11 members of the amateur club were on holiday in Bali's Kuta beach when they decided to go to the Sari Club last night.
Seconds after some of the group had left the building, the two bombs exploded.
"They got to the corner and then it went off and they turned around and..." Patterson told PA, unable to finish.
The five left inside the club have been identified among the dead, he said.
Patterson was having dinner nearby and was about to join his friends for a drink when the blasts ripped through the area.
The 32-year-old spent the next hours trawling the eight nearby hospitals and the morgue in the capital Denpasar looking for his 26-year-old friend who is missing.
The two men are both from Dubbo in New South Wales and the young man's brother and two sisters have flown out from the town to help search for him.
Patterson said they were expecting the worst.
He described the scenes inside the morgue as "horrific".
"There's just bodies ... and torsos and limbs," he said.
The shockwaves caused by the two explosions could be felt 2km away, he said.
It caused the walls of his hotel around the corner to shake and other buildings in the area had their windows blown out.
"We got back to the room and it felt like someone was banging on the shutters," he said, adding that there was now a crater around the area where the car bomb had exploded.
People in the area were still in shock, Patterson said.
In Denpasar, Bali's main city, the airport was thronged by stunned, mostly young travellers cutting short their holidays and desperate to go home after the most terrifying night of their lives.
Crowds camped out near a McDonalds, working their mobile phones to make hard-to-get airline bookings. Many had spent the night on the beach, terrified after the blasts to go near built-up areas.
But few Indonesian leaders were prepared to take this information too seriously. Instead of a considered response to a security threat, the issue degenerated into a debate where the US was flat out defending charges it was anti-Indonesian and anti-Muslim.
"I just can't understand why there is so much hostility to a friend who shares such important information with you," Mr Boyce told a group of some 15 Muslim leaders who felt the US was blackening their religion.
Sounds like a lot of this story is being held back.
Great idea, islamo's. Get the entire non-muslim world in a state of absolute blood frenzy over you. Then (I suppose) start complaining about how tough it is to exercise your religion.
(steely)
They still don't want to admit it's terrorism
Indonesia's Security Minister, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, yesterday issued his Government's first official admission that terrorists were operating within its borders, describing the bombing "as a warning to all of us that terrorism is in our backyard".
But he, President Megawati Soekarnoputri, who was in Bali last night, and the police declined to say who they believed was responsible.
A senior military source said indications pointed to a foreign group. "The message is not for Indonesians; it's probably for the Australians given the fact many of the victims are Australian," he said. "People understand Australia and Britain support the US plan to attack Iraq."
I'm a big fan of carpet bombing, but what nation would you like to bomb?
Arrogance? Seems to me more like ignorance. Incredible, historical, existential ignorance. Coupled with arrogance, I guess. Definition of evil, perhaps?
The one who seeks the first seat gets thrown to the last seat.
Explain, please.
(steely)
Of course, the construction over there is probably pretty flimsy, but that bomb(s) really did some horrific damage over a pretty wide area.
Yes, I agree the whole story is not yet out.
Leni
By Matthew Moore
October 14 2002
"I told you so" is too brutal a phrase to utter so soon after this carnage, but there will be some in the United States embassy in Jakarta thinking just that.
The US ambassador to Indonesia, Ralph Boyce, must be one of them.
For a month, Mr Boyce has been warning of a terrorist threat being hatched in Indonesia, a warning that has seen him repeatedly attacked by religious leaders and a host of leading politicians, including Indonesia's Vice-President, Hamzah Haz.
Tensions began to rise in the US mission a month ago when Mr Boyce closed his embassy for five days claiming he had specific information that his staff were at risk of a terrorist attack.
He refused then to detail the nature of that threat but he left many diplomats and political leaders confused about the severity of the threat when he took no special precautions himself, delivering a hotel lunch address with no security the day he closed the embassy doors.
Within days Mr Boyce's actions were explained in Time magazine, which said a senior al-Qaeda member in Indonesia, Omar al-Faruq, had been masterminding a car-bomb attack on the Jakarta embassy when he was arrested in June.
The CIA interrogated al-Faruq after he was deported to the US. He confessed to planning a series of terrorist attacks in Indonesia, the article said and the US embassy confirmed. But few Indonesian leaders were prepared to take this information too seriously. Instead of a considered response to a security threat, the issue degenerated into a debate where the US was flat out defending charges it was anti-Indonesian and anti-Muslim.
"I just can't understand why there is so much hostility to a friend who shares such important information with you," Mr Boyce told a group of some 15 Muslim leaders who felt the US was blackening their religion.
Soon after the embassy was re-opened, the US issued a warning of a "credible threat" to the safety of all westerners in the Javanese cultural centre of Yogyakarta.
While the British and Canadian embassies issued a similar warning, the Australian embassy chose not to, apparently unconvinced it was warranted.
The general warning further exacerbated resentment towards the US. Mr Boyce was still attempting to contain the rift emerging between the US and Indonesia when a home-made bomb exploded on the floor of a moving car just 20 metres from a Jakarta house owned and occupied by the US embassy.
The national police chief, General Da'I Bachtiar, claimed at first it was an attack on the US, as the evidence suggested.
But then the police decided the four bombers were intending to scare a person living two doors away from the US house into paying an outstanding debt.
Although police arrested the driver, and several others, no credible explanation was ever provided about why these bombers had explosives, pistols and ammunition in their homes.
No details were provided about who they were, or who taught them to make bombs, or why this was Jakarta's first known use of a bomb in a debt-collecting exercise.
Not surprisingly, US officials quickly abandoned in private their public statements that there was no evidence the bombing was an attack on the US.
As recently as Wednesday, Mr Boyce was publicly praising Indonesian leaders, including the head of the armed forces, General Endriartono Sutarto, for moving closer to acknowledging that foreign terrorists were operating in Indonesia.
Privately, though, Mr Boyce last week met three ministers, including the Security Minister, to complain about a lack of safety for his personnel.
After Saturday night's events, Mr Boyce must surely say in public what he has been saying in private.
Sounds like a truck loaded with fertilizer. Those blasts can be immense.
IMMIGRANT MUSLIM GANG RAPISTS IN AUSTRALIA
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/768345/posts
True enough. America has a long fuse, but once it's at its end (and it obviously isn't yet), Islam is toast. The only question is how much damage we'll suffer before we reach that point.
You're right. I was reading on another thread that since Australia's population is 1/12th of the U.S.'s, the body count is similar to 9/11 for them.
The populated areas of Saudi Arabia followed by Kuwait would put us off to a good start.
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