Survivors describe horror of Bali blasts

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.

Amid screams of “Allah, Allah, help!” the waiter – knocked down by a bomb blast at Bali’s beachside Café 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,” said 23-year-old Balinese native Wayan Subagia.

He said he saw the explosion 15 feet 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 café, and two other ttackers 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.

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 in Jimbaran 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 Café Nyoman, 30 yards away from where Chan was having dinner.

“We saw red sparks went off, then it just grey smoke everywhere,” she said.

“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 metal, 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, said.

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 week-long vacation, he said.

“I can only now accept our fate,” he said.

Meanwhile Police are reviewing chilling video footage of a suspected suicide bomber who was captured walking through a bustling Bali café moments before a deadly blast.

The Associated Press Television News footage shows a man in a black T-shirt calmly entering a three-storey noodle and steak restaurant in downtown Kuta - the tropical island’s popular tourist centre.

The Raja Café was packed with local and foreign tourists at candle-lit tables, talking and sipping drinks when the suspect entered. He disappears from screen just seconds before the blast.

The terrified screams of the tourists can be heard as the bomb explodes.

The video, taken by a tourist, shows a bright flash with a loud bang and gusts of black smoke filling the frame.

The camera operator flees into the street, where panicked tourists in tank-tops and shorts mill around in confusion. Kuta is hugely popular with foreign tourists, lured by its bustling nightlife, wide variety of restaurants and shops.

The bombing was one of three near-simultaneous blasts by suicide bombers wearing explosive vests on Bali island on Saturday night, killing at least 26 people and wounding more than 100. The bombers also struck at two seafood restaurants in the popular and crowded Jimbaran beach resort.

Police are using the footage as part of their investigations as they scour for clues.