Sunday, July 8, 2007

Bali Bombing: Tragedy in 2002

At 23:05 (15:05 UTC) on 12 October 2002, a suicide bomber inside the nightclub Paddy’s Pub detonated a bomb in his backpack, causing many patrons, with or without injuries, to immediately flee into the street. Fifteen seconds later, a second and much more powerful car bomb hidden inside a white Mitsubishi van, was detonated by another suicide bomber outside the Sari Club, located opposite Paddy’s Pub.

The van was also rigged for detonation by remote control in case the second bomber had a sudden change of heart. Damage to the densely populated residential and commercial district was immense, destroying neighbouring buildings and shattering windows several blocks away. The car bomb explosion left a one meter deep crater.

The local Sanglah hospital was ill-equipped to deal with the scale of the disaster and was overwhelmed with the number of injured, particularly burn victims. There were so many people injured by the explosion that some of the injured had to be placed in hotel pools near the explosion site to ease the pain of their burns. Many of the injured were flown to the relatively close proximity of Darwin and Perth for specialist burns treatment.

In all 202 people were killed in the Kuta bombings. The effect on the tourist industry was massive, with many Australians declaring they would never set foot in Bali again. The local economy suffered greatly and many local businesses went bankrupt, locals sometimes returning to their village to farm rice. The economy was slowly recovering when a second bombing occurred in 2005.

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