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.
Saudis ofcourse.
Perhaps the multicultural islamobutt kissers are full of excrement. Maybe the only way to achieve world peace is for a lot (not all, but a lot) of muslims to die. The faster the West wakes up to that reality, the better.
They'll also find a way to blame the U.S.
Prayers going "down under" for the Aussies. God Bless them all.
In the meantime, lets get busy and get that meeting between these beasts and their "Allah" going asap.
Know that you have an ally in the USA.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
