BALI, Indonesia — In the dark and the screaming chaos, said one survivor on Sunday, it was sometimes hard to know whether the man who appeared to be running toward him through the flames was alive or already dead.
“Like you look at their face and you can’t make anything out; there’s nothing left,” said Jared Kays, 23, a vacationer from London. “People were missing ears, people were missing limbs, their skin was peeling off.”
On the morning after what may have been the deadliest terrorist attack since Sept. 11 last year, what remained of two discos on this sunny tourist island looked as if they had been bombed from the air instead of from the roadside.
The car bombing just before midnight on Saturday sent fire raging through a dozen buildings at Kuta Beach, with its bars and dance clubs. It is one of the world’s most popular vacation spots for surfers, backpackers and college students.
The death toll continued to climb on Sunday, to at least 182, most of the dead being foreigners on vacation. A dozen of the 300 injured survivors were reported to be in critical condition, and another 30 bodies were estimated still to be buried in the rubble.
On Sunday, the survivors described what seemed to be two explosions, the first small one sounding perhaps like fireworks; the next, seconds later, like an apocalypse.
“There was a noise,” said Hanabeth Luke, 22, of Britain, whose Australian boyfriend was killed in the fire.
“We were all dancing away, some cheesy pop song,” she said. “We stopped and looked at each other. ‘What was that sound?’ We sort of laughed nervously and carried on dancing. And within five or ten seconds, voom! Your feet were just sucked out from under you. I was lying on the floor. Everything was black.
“It was crackling with flames.”
Though investigators have only begun their work, diplomats — and President Bush as well — made no secret of their belief that this was the latest of a recent series of attacks linked to al-Qaeda.
“On behalf of the people of
the United States, I condemn
this heinous act,” Bush said on Sunday in a statement. “The world must confront this global menace, terrorism.
“We must together challenge and defeat the idea that the wanton killing of innocents advances any cause or supports any aspirations. And we must call this despicable act by its rightful name: murder.”
The U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, denounced the attack as “a despicable act of terror.”
The explosion at the nightclubs came almost at the same moment as a smaller blast near the U.S. consulate here that caused no injuries. Earlier Saturday, a suspected homemade bomb shattered windows but caused no injuries at the Philippine consulate in the Indonesian city of Manado.
The day’s attacks followed a half dozen other bombings in Southeast Asia in the past three weeks. These included two in the southern Philippines that killed one American soldier and at least 11 Filipinos and a grenade explosion near a U.S. Embassy residence in Jakarta.