SINGAPORE, May 9: New Zealand cricket captain Stephen Fleming said Thursday that his team had been five minutes from death when a huge bomb was detonated outside their hotel in Pakistan.

“Without being dramatic, we were five minutes away from probably losing players,” Fleming said during a stopover in Singapore after the team abandoned their tour for security reasons following Wednesday’s blast.

Fourteen people were killed, 11 of them French navy engineers, when a suicide bomber in a car packed with explosives blew up a bus outside a luxury hotel in Karachi.

The New Zealand team, staying in a hotel across the road, was preparing to leave the hotel when the bomber struck.

“It’s not something you really want to go into in detail, but I saw enough carnage that would stay with me and haunt me for the rest of my life,” Fleming said when asked to describe the scene after the blast.

“Half the guys’ rooms were blown up. All the suitcases were full of glass and debris,” he said.

The bomb was not the team’s only brush with death in the last few years.

A national side was in Sri Lanka in 1987 when a car bomb killed more than 100 people in the capital, Colombo, and five years later another bomb exploded outside their hotel in the same city.

Last year the team was again in Sri Lanka when a suicide attack by Tamil Tiger rebels closed Colombo’s international airport.

The team was supposed to tour Pakistan last year, but cancelled in the aftermath of the Sept 11 attacks on New York and Washington and the subsequent US-led military action in Afghanistan.

“From all accounts, this one was a lot closer,” Fleming said. “It’s just a matter of luck that none of our players or more people were hurt.”

Team physiotherapist Dayle Shackel was the only New Zealand casualty, hurt by flying glass.

“He had a lot of glass in his arms,” Fleming said. “He was one guy who was on the team bus.”

Fleming was in the hotel restaurant about to eat breakfast when the bomb went off, but some of his teammates were on the way outside while others were preparing to leave their rooms.

He said it was difficult to think about cricket after such a tragedy, but added he did not expect it to hamper the side’s preparation for the 2003 World Cup.

But he said players would have to choose if they wanted to part of a team that toured volatile places.

“I guess it now comes down to individuals if they want to be put in this situation again,” he said.

“From a personal point of view, it would be very hard to see myself wanting to go back to something like that,” he said.

The second match of a two-Test series had been due to start Wednesday. New Zealand were thrashed by Pakistan in the first match.

Meanwhile, Australia’s one-day captain Ricky Ponting has backed New Zealand’s decision to call off their Pakistan tour.

“It was terrible news and it’s sad that these things happen around the world,” Ponting said in an interview on Australian television Thursday.

“I’d say we would have probably done the same thing.”

Ponting said Australia were looking forward to their three-match one-day series against Pakistan in Australia next month.

“They’re a very good side. Of course they were our World Cup opponents in the final in 1999,” Ponting said.—Reuters