Four expatriate members of a Taiwan rugby team and a Taiwanese supporter were missing Sunday after a pair of bomb blasts ripped through a discotheque in the beachfront town of Kuta on Indonesia's resort island of Bali Saturday night.
The missing male team members were identified as two South Africans, one Briton and one Australian in addition to one Taiwanese woman traveling with the group, according to Ben Walker, a team member who stayed behind in Taipei due to an injury. Walker was in regular cellphone contact with distraught team members in Bali who had been desperately searching the local hospitals all day for any signs of their friends.
PHOTO: REUTERS
"They didn't find anybody," Walker said.
A fifth team member from South Africa was said to be in hospital in intensive care.
Several team members were believed to have met up in Kuta town yesterday shortly before the downtown strip of pubs and discos was blown apart by the explosions, he said.
The group of some 15 Taipei Baboons Rugby Football Club members and five supporters had traveled to Bali for the annual two-day Bali Tens rugby tournament.
The tournament, held at the Grand Bali Hotel field near Kuta town, includes 16 teams from Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, Hong Kong and other Asian nations.
Alex Chen (陳建志), spokesman for the Taipei Economic and Trade Office in Jakarta told the Taipei Times by phone that "One Taiwan national, Kuo Huei-ming, was reported missing by her friends from the ball club tonight after going into Kuta town on Saturday with other members of her group."
Earlier in the day, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Katharine Chang (
Currently some 1,500 Taiwanese tourists are in Bali, including some 70 to 80 tour groups. So far, the majority of Taiwanese traveling in tour groups have been accounted for.
The Tourism Bureau has made contact with Taiwanese tour groups in Bali and confirmed they are safe, Chang said. But she cautioned against "overconfidence," saying: "The situation is still unfolding and we cannot rule out individual travelers" [possibly being in the area of the blast].
Despite warnings Sunday from Britain and New Zealand advising their citizens against traveling to Indonesia, Chang said the government had no plans to tell the 150,000 Taiwanese that visit the tropical getaway each year to stay home.
"We are urging Taiwanese planning to travel to Bali to exercise caution" and stay away from Kuta town's tourist strip, she said.
Meanwhile, Chen said that a representative from the trade office was already on the ground in Bali to coordinate with local police and area hospitals to locate any missing Taiwanese, including Kuo.
"So far Miss Kuo has not been found in any hospitals so we will now filing a missing persons report with the local police."
While the majority of tourists from Taiwan prefer to travel on package tours, savvy local travelers are increasingly opting to map out their own own vacations, raising the possibility that some Taiwanese may remain unaccounted for.
"What we are concerned about now is individual travelers and the lack of information on them," he said.
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