Bombs designed to cause maximum carnage

Indonesian police officers install a police line near deserted dining tables at Jimbaran Fish Cafe. Dimas Ardian/Getty Images

The bombs that tore through the three restaurants in Bali early yesterday were designed to cause maximum carnage.

They were packed with deadly shrapnel and sent objects such as ball-bearings through crowded restaurants, causing horrific injuries.

A severed head was found 50m from the body after one of the blasts.

At least 25 people died and more than 100 were injured in the restaurants at Jimbaran beach resort and Kuta.

Terror returned to the island almost three years to the day since two bombs killed 202 people in Kuta night spots.

The latest attack was carried out by suicide bombers, according to a senior Indonesian anti-terror official.

Major-General Ansyaad Mbai said the remains of their bodies were found at the scenes.

He said the attacks appeared to have been carried out by the regional militant group Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), which was blamed for the 2002 bombings.

Most of those killed in the latest strike were Indonesian. Three Australians, including a Perth teenager, were also among the dead.

Up to 1500 New Zealanders are thought to be holidaying in Bali. Last night the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said one NZ man had been injured, but had told his family he was okay.

The Australian Government has invited any traumatised New Zealanders to join its evacuation flights to Sydney.

More than 100 people were wounded in the latest attacks, 17 of them seriously.

Witnesses said amid the shattered glass and debris, blood pooled around victims desperate for help and severed limbs and heads lay in the wreckage.

The bombs caused horrific injuries, with shrapnel and ball bearings embedded in people's bodies.

British tourist Daniel Martin said the Kuta blast caused sheer chaos.

"It was everyone pitching in to help the wounded.

"There were people lying in the street with serious wounds, blood pouring into the street."

Vicky Griffiths, from Newcastle in New South Wales, said she thought the first explosion at Jimbaran was a gas bottle going off, moments before she felt the full impact of the second.

She was recovering in hospital yesterday with ball-bearings lodged in her back.

"The first explosion I actually thought was a gas bottle so I ... just said to everyone, 'stay calm, it's probably just a gas bottle, we'll be okay'," she told ABC radio yesterday.

Ms Griffiths said she had not realised the extent of her injuries until she arrived at hospital.

" ... I didn't realise I had the ball-bearings in my back until they had x-rayed me."

Although no group has claimed responsibility for the attacks, authorities suspect the al Qaeda- linked Jemaah Islamiyah.

The 2002 bombings killed 88 Australians and three New Zealanders.

A New Zealand police security expert based at Jakarta, Superintendent Athol Soper, said from Bali yesterday that help had been offered to the Indonesia authorities investigating the blasts.

A disaster victim identification unit, used this year to identify tsunami victims in Thailand, was on alert.

Mr Soper and two New Zealand diplomatic staff from Jakarta were in Bali tracking New Zealanders and checking hospital casualty lists.

Prime Minister Helen Clark joined world leaders in condemning the attacks, describing them as cold-blooded and callous.

"Such cowardly and indiscriminate acts of violence, which are deliberately aimed at innocent people, are an affront to humanity."

Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono vowed to track down those behind the bombings.

Mr Yudhoyono had warned just weeks ago there were indications that terrorist attacks were planned, and the Australian and New Zealand Governments had told tourists not to go to Bali because the risk was serious.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard last week unveiled harsh new security laws to be introduced there, and last night Foreign Affairs Minister Phil Goff said the measures would be considered here by the new Government.

"Terrorism is an ongoing factor that we need to have at the forefront of our foreign policy," he said. "It is a fact of life."

Indonesian experts last night said the targeting of Bali a second time by terrorists would shatter that island's economy, which is heavily reliant on tourism.

It would also harm tourism across the region.

Professor Jim Veitch of Victoria University said from the United States that the latest strikes, combined with unrest in places such as Malaysia and Thailand, would bring home to New Zealanders that terrorism was a real regional risk.

"It has taken a long time for New Zealanders to really take it seriously.

"Despite the increased ability of the Indonesian police, despite the Indonesian police being backed up by the Australian police, despite all of that - that they [the bombers] can still carry out these attacks shows their strength."

Bali police chief Made Mangku Pastika said police were investigating whether suicide bombers were responsible, but added: "We have not come to that conclusion yet. We need to develop the investigation."

Witnesses said hundreds of people had been in the area when the first bomb went off in Kuta, apparently on the second floor of a restaurant.

There was no crater outside the building, indicating the blast was not caused by a car bomb.

Within 10 minutes, at the beachside restaurant strip at Jimbaran Beach 30km south of Kuta, the idyllic evening was shattered by two more powerful explosions.

"The blast there [in Jimbaran] is much stronger because there we found a head that was separated some 50m from its body," Senior Police Commissioner Dewa Parsana said later.

Many holidaymakers escape the bustle of Kuta for Jimbaran to eat seafood on the beach and watch glorious sunsets over the turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean.

Soon after the blasts, bodies lay stretched out on the sand or placed roughly on the tables of the fish restaurants.

Unlike the fertiliser bombs which destroyed the Sari club and Paddy's bar in 2002, and which caused a lethal firestorm, yesterday's bombs were smaller and seemed to cause relatively few burns, said witnesses.

A medical officer, who declined to be named, said all of the critically injured victims suffered similar injuries - huge head, abdominal and chest wounds caused by shrapnel.

"There are not so many burn wounds, it's mostly blast wounds from shrapnel," she said.

"When we started looking at x-rays we could see that in the bomb itself there must have been pellets, because there were lots of foreign objects lodged in people's bodies."

Australian journalist Sean Mulcahy saw the aftermath of the deadly blasts. "They were designed to maim and wound and kill as many Westerners as possible," he told ABC radio.

Australian Mercedes Corby, the sister of convicted drug trafficker Schapelle Corby, said she saw victims with shrapnel wounds, broken bones, horrific burns and eye wounds.

"One lady has burns to her eyes and deafness from the blast," she said.

Australian photographer Jason Childs found one couple lying on the beach at Jimbaran, one with a serious leg wound, the other apparently blinded by one of the blasts.

He said the woman had a huge open wound on her leg and was bleeding from shrapnel wounds to her body. Her husband appeared to have been blinded.

- AAP