THE sign on the noticeboard in Bali’s Sanglah hospital is stark: “R you looking 4 a young girl. Approx 10-14 years old; Western; light brown hair? In ICU (Intensive Care Unit)”.

The sign, put up yesterday morning, was still there last night. No one had come forward to claim one of the youngest victims of Saturday night’s bombing.

The unidentified girl was one of nearly 500 holidaymakers killed or injured as one of Asia’s top tourist destinations was engulfed in terror.

The Sari Club, known as the “SC” to its aficionados in Bali’s surfing community, was warming up for Saturday night, the last night for many of the tourists on weekly packages.

Daniel Whiston, a 23-year-old New Zealander, had been there every night for the past week with his friends. But on Saturday they decided at about 10.30pm that the music was too loud and they should move across the road to the slightly quieter Paddy’s bar, festooned with Irish flags and fake palm trees in 40-gallon oil drums. Half an hour later the bombs exploded, with just seconds separating the blasts.

“I was sitting there drinking and having a pretty good time when ‘boom’, and then a second one. After the first one, I stood up, and the second one just picked me up and threw me over a wall,” Mr Whiston said yesterday.

The first explosion looked “like a car with a flame up through the middle of it”, said survivors. “Then we saw the fireball, and it was incredibly wide and probably about ten storeys high just in flames alone. It was a mushroom cloud of flames,” said Allen Joseph, who was taking a taxi back to his hotel after dinner with his partner when they became snarled in traffic less than 200 metres from the epicentre of the blast.

The explosion wrecked the Sari Club. Terrified dancers, many bleeding profusely, struggled to escape the flames, trying to get out of the club’s single narrow entrance.

The fire spread to surrounding buildings, including Paddy’s bar, where Mr Whiston had been enjoying a beer with friends moments before. Many people had horrific injuries. Mr Whiston, who works for the ambulance service in New Zealand, sat by a fellow countryman who had had his legs blown off. Mr Joseph told of men and women running over broken glass in bare feet.

Yesterday Mr Whiston was staring at the burnt-out metal frame of the chair where he had been sitting. “Craziness, pure madness, people everywhere, shock, body parts, just fear, fear,” he said.

The blast knocked out the town’s power supply. Bryce Thompson, a New Zealander who was with Mr Whiston when the bomb exploded, recalled “people running, screaming, just madness, dark except for the fires burning around the place, pure madness”.

As the fires consumed the Sari Club and Paddy’s, some people tried to rescue those trapped inside, but they were beaten back by the flames.

Yesterday the scene was one of devastation. The Sari Club was razed, the charred rubble raked into piles by emergency staff sifting for the remains of those who had not escaped.

Paddy’s was a burnt shell, still smoking, bright remnants of the Irish flags vivid amid the black ruins. Among puddles left by the firefighters lay scraps of the uniform of young dancers worldwide: singed Nike and Reebok trainers.

An Indonesian emergency worker in a bright orange T-shirt pulled on gloves and stooped to pick up a blackened scrap of something that might once have been human.

Behind a police cordon, stood the normally ebullient Balinese, stunned into silence. Bali’s hospitals were all but overwhelmed by the number of casualties. At Songhla hospital, doctors appealed for linen, bottled water, medicines and blood. Hundreds of people turned up. Young Indonesians with English-language skills volunteered as translators, others lined up to donate blood.

By yesterday evening, below the note asking if anyone was looking for a girl with light brown hair, a second notice had been added: “Missing: Linda Makawand; 45-55; mother of Renee.” On the bottom of the notice someone had written in ballpoint:

“Deceased. See morgue No 21.”

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Afghanistan News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• Mandela’s tribe threatens President Zuma
• The French empire strikes back
• Wife of cheating governor exacts a political revenge