BALI (Indonesia), Oct 12: At least 28 people, including 18 foreigners, were killed and 120 wounded in explosions at nightclubs on Indonesia’s resort island of Bali on Saturday night, at least one of them caused by a bomb, officials said.
Police said there had been three blasts at two nightclubs. One official said they had occurred simultaneously around 11.30pm local time (8.30pm PST), one of them not far from the US consulate on Bali.
“At this stage we have 14 people dead. There are around 120 badly and lightly wounded,” Yatim Suyatmo, police spokesman for Bali, said.
He said one of the explosions had been caused by a home-made bomb.
One local photographer said he had seen up to 15 cars wrecked by one of the blasts, with a number of people still inside the club.
Police said it was too early to say if all the blasts had been caused by bombs, but they come at a time of growing security concerns in the world’s most populous Muslim nation in the wake of recent terror threats.
Police denied an earlier report that an explosion had gone off in Ubud, another popular tourist town on the island. They said all were concentrated in the Kuta Beach area.
An official at a local hospital said the wounded included Americans and Australians.
Eyewitnesses spoke of chaos in the area near one of the blasts, at the Sari nightclub, near the famous Kuta beach strip, as foreign tourists were revelling on a typical Saturday night.
The island is Indonesia’s most popular tourist destination, and a favourite for Australians and Japanese.
One witness said windows on shops had been blown out up to 500 metres away from the Sari nightclub, and that the blast had been heard many kilometres away.
“I saw one man, who looked Indonesian, whose head had been blown off. The area is a wreck. The cars were badly hit by the explosion,” said the photographer, Murdani Usman, speaking from the scene near the Sari nightclub.
Police said lights in the area were out.
A State Department spokeswoman in Washington said she had no information on whether any Americans had been killed or injured.
While a number of regions in Indonesia, and the capital Jakarta, have been hit by violence in recent years, Bali had long been considered a safe haven and spared from any unrest.—Reuters
