Rugby players killed in Bali blast

A shocked tourist told today of how five members of an Australian rugby league team died in the nightclub blast on Bali – while others missed death by seconds.

Australian Brett Patterson, who was travelling with the players from Sydney, said 11 members of the amateur club, the Coogee Wombats, 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...” Mr Patterson told PA, unable to finish.

The five left inside the club have been identified among the dead, he said.

Mr 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.

Mr 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 two kilometres 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, Mr Patterson said.