Special Australian Air Force and Qantas airline flights evacuated hundreds of terrified tourists from the Indonesian vacation island of Bali late Sunday amid growing fears that Al Qaeda or one of its affiliates had brought its terror campaign to the world’s largest Muslim country.
The death toll from a car bombing outside a disco crowded with foreigners rose to 188, including two Americans. More bodies were believed still buried in the rubble.
More than 300 people were injured, many of them Australians on holiday. At least three Americans were among the wounded.
No one among Indonesia’s militant Muslim organizations claimed responsibility for the blast.
The State Department ordered all dependents of U.S. diplomats in Indonesia to leave the country, along with all non-essential personnel, a department official said Sunday night. U.S. Ambassador Ralph Boyce advised American residents or visitors “to examine the necessity of continuing to remain in Indonesia.”
Witnesses and survivors who arrived in Melbourne on Sunday said they saw blown-off limbs, maimed people trying to crawl to safety and the dead and dying burning in an inferno inside the packed nightclub in Kuta city.
The club was crowded with Australian Rules football and rugby players from several teams on an end-of-the-season vacation on the resort island east of Java, a favorite destination for Australian tourists and surfers.
David Hodder, 25, a vacationing rugby player, said he was sitting by the bar when the explosion knocked him out.
“When I came to, the roof was down with flames flying out and people running over me,” he said.
Richard Poore, another surviving athlete, said he saw severed limbs and “people’s backs on fire.”
The Indonesian police chief, Gen. Dai Bachtiar, said a jeep-type local vehicle known as a Kijanj, had been parked outside the disco packed with C4 explosive and possibly detonated by remote control.
A senior intelligence expert said the attackers hurled army-type grenades into the club before detonating the car bomb. Survivors described what seemed to be two explosions, the first small one sounding perhaps like fireworks; the next, seconds later, like an apocalypse.
“This was the same pattern as other terrorist attacks in Indonesia. The intention of Muslim hard-liners is not to attack the cities with big Muslim populations but to aim at non-Muslim communities. This time their aim was to kill the tourist industry,” said the intelligence official by telephone from Jakarta.
In Washington, President Bush condemned the attack as “a cowardly act designed to create terror and chaos” and offered U.S. help “to help bring these murderers to justice.” An FBI team was en route to Bali to help in the blast investigation.
The attacks were on the second anniversary of the Al Qaeda-linked attack against USS Cole off Yemen that killed 17 American sailors amid signs of increasing terrorist activity.
The Bali blast late Saturday sent shock waves through Southeast Asia, a region already jittery with foreboding after terrorist plots were foiled in the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia over recent weeks. Police in all three countries have arrested suspected terrorists allegedly linked to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda.
The death toll makes Saturday’s bombing the worst terrorist massacre since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. It came three days after Washington sent out another terrorism alert.
Authorities in Australia were on high alert after the United States last week warned of a possible threat to blow up power stations and electrical transmission lines. Last month, the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta reported that it had “credible threat information” that Westerners in central Java, which does not include Bali, “may be targeted for violence in the immediate future.”
State Department spokeswoman Jo-Anne Prokopowicz said the identities of the dead and injured Americans were being withheld until the next of kin were informed. “There are ongoing efforts to identify other possible victims,” she added.
Ex-football player missing
In Texas, family members said Jake Young, 34, a former All-America football player at the University of Nebraska, was among the missing in the area of the blasts. Young, a lawyer who had been living in Hong Kong, was in Bali to play in a rugby tournament.
Rep. Tom Osborne (R-Neb.), Young’s former coach at Nebraska, said officials with the State Department had recovered Young’s passport but had not located him by late Sunday.
Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri, who has cautiously attempted to balance Muslim sensitivity and anti-American sentiments against Washington’s pressure to crack down on militant groups, toured the bombing site Sunday and said she would now fully cooperate with the international community in the fight against terrorism.
Visibly moved by the carnage, she said, “The bombings should be a warning for all of us that terrorism constitutes a real danger and political threat to our national security.”
In Australia, Prime Minister John Howard, a staunch supporter of U.S. policy, described the car bomb as “a wretched, cowardly attack that clearly, on the evidence available to us, is an act of terrorism.”
Howard said he would review Australia’s national security policy and reminded Australians that their continent “is not immune from terror.”
As news of the attack spread, 30,000 pacifists demonstrated in Melbourne on Sunday against the possibility of a war with Iraq. Under placards saying “No to war,” speakers argued the U.S. policy of confrontation is designed to gain access to Iraq’s oil reserves and that a war would only foment more terrorism.
An Indonesian politician on Sunday said that rumors had swirled through parliament for days that there could be a terror attack if the United States went to war against Iraq.
“I believe the Indonesian intelligence was warned about this,” said Alvin Lie, a member of the moderate National Mandate Party.
The explosion on Bali, which had been considered a safe area for foreigners in Indonesia, is certain to add to the strain between Indonesia’s fledgling democracy and the Muslim fundamentalists who seek an Islamic state.
Islamic preachers such as Abu Bakar Bashir, the alleged ideologue of the militant pan-Asian Muslim organization Jemaah Islamiyah, and Jafar Umar Thalib, head of Laskar Jihad, a paramilitary group that fought Christians in recent years, have exploited the new democratic freedom of speech to attract converts to their cause from among Indonesia’s 210 million people, 80 percent poor and scattered over 17,000 islands.
Washington had asked Indonesia to arrest both Islamic leaders, but at the time Indonesian officials said there was no evidence against them. Thalib does face charges he incited religious violence.
Militants had made threats
The ferocity of the Bali attack was preceded by attacks of militant groups such as Laskar Jihad that have targeted Christian natives in Ambon and Celebes islands and recently threatened to aim their wrath at Bali, a Hindu enclave. Bali also is a favorite playground for foreigners, especially Australians.
Survivors arriving in Melbourne painted a horrific picture of the wounded crawling through a wall of fire as buildings, cars and motorbikes were ignited by the bomb.
Simon Quayle, coach of the Kingsley Football Club in Perth, said eight of his players who went to the Sari Club were still missing.
“Me and the other 12 blokes got away with our lives. But it was chaos in there, mate,” he said.
“There was blood, the smell of burned skin and people yelling,” said Martin Lyons, a Melbourne tourist.
Senior Indonesian military and intelligence experts said the attack on the Sari disco was a well-coordinated operation.
“These people were no amateurs, and the pieces of the grenades we found were the kind only used by the military,” said one of Megawati’s advisers.
Opinions were divided among military and intelligence experts whether the motive of the explosion was to further weaken Megawati’s lackluster presidency and pave the way for a more Muslim-oriented and anti-American regime, or whether “outside” terrorists such as Al Qaeda have used Bali as the launching pad for another phase in their war against the United States and its allies.
“My take on this is that’s an internal action carried out by hard-liners in Indonesia,” said Muchjar Jara, a spokesman for Indonesia’s intelligence service.
Many of the wounded survivors were fighting for their lives at overcrowded Bali hospitals where items such as dressings and painkillers quickly ran out, prompting Australia’s Air Force on Sunday to fly in a plane of doctors, nurses and medicines.
