They Took a Vacation, Now They're Dead

Oct. 16, 2002 -- Bare, browned shoulders quivering with grief, their team caps pulled low over teary faces, the surviving members of a visiting rugby team made their way down the main street in Kuta, Indonesia, to pay their respects to the dead.

They were rugby players, surfers, honeymooners, families and friends, most of them killed because they did nothing more than take a vacation.

There are still no firm numbers of the dead and injured in Saturday night's bomb blasts at the Sari Club, a happening nightclub in Bali's Kuta resort area. Only one thing is for sure — the death toll is getting higher every day.

Officials estimate that nearly 200 people were killed in Indonesia's worst terrorist attack, many of them Australian citizens enjoying the sapphire beaches, sun-drenched white shores and relatively cheap prices of Bali, a tourist paradise otherwise known as the Island of the Gods.

But the gods seem to have frowned on Bali, indeed the entire region, this week as grieving loved ones dashed from hospital to hospital hoping for a miracle, stunned tourists gathered at candlelit vigils, volunteers rushed ice into morgues to preserve bodies in the tropical heat and stretchers bearing the wounded were wheeled down the tarmac at Australian airports.

Clinging on Hope

Australia today is a country in mourning. Four days after the blast, the loved ones of the missing are still clinging onto hope although they know their loved ones probably are among the dead.

A split second of footage on the television news gave the family of Michelle Dunlop hope that the 30-year-old Australian woman was still alive.

A fuzzy image of an injured woman under a green sheet in a Bali hospital convinced Karen Cook that the victim of the bombing was her sister and that she was still alive.

"Her little finger is splayed out, away from the rest of her fingers," Cook told The Age, an Australian daily. "That is the way Michelle always holds her hand and it is the same as in this picture."

Although official sources have not been able to provide information, The Age reported that Dunlop's family have taken matters into their own hands, calling hospital after hospital for information.

A 'Second Wave'

The past few weeks have seen a series of attacks on Western targets around the world, prompting fears of a "second wave" of terror assaults after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.

Last week, an explosion ripped through the Limburg, a French commercial tanker off the coast of Yemen in what French investigators suspect was an explosion set off by remote control.

In oil-rich Kuwait last week, two assailants opened fire on U.S. Marines on a Kuwaiti island. One Marine was killed and another wounded before the assailants were shot dead.

The attack was followed by a gunfire exchange the very next day, when a U.S. Army soldier fired a shot at a civilian vehicle overtaking a military Humvee. U.S. officials said the civilian vehicle's occupant had pointed a gun.

Speaking to reporters in Washington on Tuesday, President Bush said the Limburg attack, the recent attacks on U.S. troops in Kuwait and the Bali explosion all point to the al Qaeda network.

"It does look like a pattern of attacks that the enemy, albeit on the run, is trying to once again frighten and kill freedom-loving people," said Bush. "This is a reminder of how dangerous the world can be if these al Qaeda are free to roam."

A Difficult Domestic Situation

In the past, Indonesia has rejected the notion that al Qaeda was a presence in the island nation, which is home to the world's largest Muslim population.

Faced with growing domestic support for Islamic parties, as well as religious and separatist wars in many parts of the vast archipelago nation, President Megawati Sukarnoputri's government has consistently maintained that unlike other Arab nations, Indonesia's Muslims are moderate and peaceful.

Although Megawati was among the first leaders to call Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, she has publicly remained unconvinced that indigenous Islamist groups had international links or targets.

But experts have consistently dismissed official Indonesian protests. "The Bali attack bears the hallmark of the Islamist group Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a group that forms a central part of al Qaeda's southeast Asian network," said Rohan Gunaratna, a former investigator at the U.N. Terrorism Prevention Branch, and author of Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror.

"The JI is the only group that has both the intention and the capability to conduct a mass casualty attack against the predominantly non-Western target," said Gunaratna. "The past modus operandi of the JI and al Qaeda indicates that the group invested significant time in planning and preparing for the attack."

But Abu Bakar Bashir, a Muslim cleric widely believed to head the JI has repeatedly denied any involvement in the blast, blaming it instead on the CIA.

Indonesia Comes to Term With Al Qaeda on Its Soil

While Bush has repeatedly warned Megawati that al Qaeda cells were active in Indonesia, most recently in a phone call in mid-September, Gunaratna says that at certain points the United States had not done its best to aid the Indonesian fight against terror.

"America needs to invest more resources — economically and through military ties — to deepen its influence in Indonesia," said Gunaratna. "For a long time, Australia and America failed to provide the Indonesian military with assistance because of its poor human rights track record in East Timor. But I think it's important to bear in mind that the military can always be relied on to fight the Islamists. In a conflict situation, every military violates human rights, it's a question of the degree of violation."

Indeed, the Bali bombings — the worst terror attack since Sept. 11, 2001 — led to Indonesia's first ever admission that al Qaeda's tentacles had reached deep into the South East Asian nation.

On Monday, Indonesian Defense Minister Matori Abdul Djalil said: "We are sure al Qaeda is here."

Australians Question Their U.S. Ties

But for the families and friends of victims of the Bali attacks, Indonesia's turnaround admission comes too late.

With his country suffering its biggest lost of human life since World War II, Australian Prime Minister John Howard is facing a volley of attacks back home.

A report in the Washington Post on Tuesday said the United States had allegedly received intelligence information signaling an attack on a Western tourist site in Indonesia late last month and had upgraded security at U.S. offices and buildings across the South East Asian nation.

Amid criticism of the Australian government's failure to upgrade its warnings to travelers, Howard said Australia's warnings had been "quite strong" but said he was unaware of the U.S. intelligence.

"What I can tell you is that there was nothing in the intelligence that constituted a specific warning about this attack," he told reporters on Tuesday.

But many Australians are questioning if Howard's strong support for the United States and the war on terror was to blame for the carnage in Bali.

Australia was among the first to make firm commitments to the war in Afghanistan and has already pledged military support for any action in Iraq.

A Region Changed

While Howard has vociferously dismissed the accusation on radio and television talk shows, Gunaratna concedes that the threat to Australians has increased because of its involvement in the war in Afghanistan. But, he maintains, Australia has "no option but to join hands with the United States against the threat of terrorism."

"Australia features prominently in the JI regional structure," he said. "As such, Australia has no option but to work jointly to detect and destroy the JI organization. Its failure to do so will result in further attacks in the region and even inside Australia."

Certainly, the lushly-wooded, tourists' paradise island of Bali will never be the same again. A predominantly Hindu-island in Muslim-dominated Indonesia, Balinese have paid scant attention to economic and socio-political problems that have plagued the archipelago nation.

Today, Bali is the scene of a major terrorist investigation. Indonesian authorities are "intensively questioning" two Indonesian men tracked down after one of their identity cards was found near the site of the Bali blasts. And earlier this week, 10 Pakistani nationals in Bali were also being questioned. For Bali's once-thriving tourism industry, it's a sign of things to come and the signs are not fortuitous.

ABCNEWS.com's Scott McKenzie contributed to this report.