Those responsible for the October 2002 bombings in Bali died a violent death in the early hours of Sunday morning.

The men were shot to death by a firing squad assembled by Indonesia’s anti-terrorism security force. Most people would reconcile the executions of those that wreaked so much destruction and caused the deaths of 202 innocent civilians as fitting. Others oppose capital punishment in any circumstances.

No consideration was given by the bombers towards their victims, whose families and friends, still mourn the deaths and injuries six years after that dreadful Saturday night of October 12 2002.

Yes the bombers died violent deaths but years after they were sentenced. They weren’t taken out without notice. They had years to prepare, pray, and communicate with loved ones. They even had time to appeal for mercy, which they did. Their victims had no such time, no chance to prepare or pray. They had no chance to plead for mercy. They were blown to bits in the middle of the night. Those that survived will not forget that night. Many of them have lost limbs, their sight, their hearing. Some are mentally challenged, many suffer from stress and trauma. The Balinese also suffered. Many died in the bomb blasts. The population in its entirety suffered from the huge downturn in the island’s single economy, tourism, which today has still not recovered from the horror of 2002.

The Sari nightclub, where a car bomb exploded shortly after the bombing at Paddy’s Pub, is today a memorial. The destroyed club has never been rebuilt.

Al-Qaeda was blamed initially, or the standard line from most politicians was “It has the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda attack.” It wasn’t. In fact a spokesman for al-Qaeda denied it was involved, although a subsequent tape from Osama bin Laden praised the bombers for targeting Australians and Americans. It was local terrorism. A Jihadist group Jemaah Islamiyah that was responsible. Indonesian police acted quickly and arrested the three suspects within weeks of the bombings, tried and convicted them, and on Sunday executed them. Investigations into other perpetrators are ongoing.

At the time of the attacks local police believed they had been the work of a foreign government as the bombs were of a scale in terms of size and sophistication, that they believed the locals would not have been capable of carrying out such attacks. The Australian Federal Police assisted the Indonesian investigation, and nothing more was heard of those claims.

For many families Sunday’s executions will bring closure. For some, nothing will. Their lives have been shattered, just as the lives of their loved ones were ended so prematurely. Almost all of those that died that fateful night, and a large majority of those that were injured, were in their late teens or early 20s. Being October it was prime time for the end-of-season sporting trips, a vigil for many sporting codes in Australia. The Coogee Beach Dolphins junior rugby league club from Sydney, the Kingsley Football Club from Perth in Western Australia, the Sturt Football Club, the Forbes Platypii rugby union club, the Southport Sharks football club, South Sydney Juniors Rugby League Club, the Melbourne Football Club and the Kangaroos Football Club, were among the many sporting teams to visit Bali in October 2002.

The Kingsley football team had won its first Reserve Grade premiership. The senior team had also made the grand final but lost. The club had its best year ever. Twenty players and coaches headed off Saturday morning October 12 to Perth Airport in two stretch limousines. They boarded their plane to Bali and were there within four hours. They settled into their hotel, The Bounty, and then went out on the town. By around 9 to 10pm they ended up in the Sari Club.

The bombs went off within 10 seconds of each other, Gerard Wright wrote in The Observer. The van exploded first, sending shrapnel in every direction, cutting a lethal, bloody passage through the crowd gathered in and around Paddy's Pub, across the road. Inside the Sari Club there was just enough time for the sound and concern at the first explosion to register before the second bomb exploded, at 11.05pm.

In all, 202 people died in the explosions. The youngest victim, Australian Abbey Borgia, was 13. She died with her mother, Deborah, 45. Hundreds more were injured, some so severely burnt and traumatised as to make the fate of lost friends, family and loved ones seem like an almost blessed alternative. Among the casualties were 88 Australians. It is not an exaggeration to say that the shockwave of the Bali bombing rolled through Australia in much the same way as the terrorist attacks of 11 September struck at America's soul.

For Australians, a population of 19 million, there was the immediate, searing pain of recognition. If they didn't know a relative or friend or acquaintance caught in the explosions, they were familiar with the location. Bali, and particularly the resort town of Kuta, on a narrow peninsula at the southern end of the island, was to Australians what the Costa Blanca has been to generations of British holidaymakers - a tropical holiday destination: close, cheap and exotic. Foreign travel for beginners, said The Observer report.

They were enjoying what Bob Carr, the then-premier of New South Wales, would later describe in a speech to the parliament of New South Wales as 'Our kind of freedom - Australian freedom. The good, free, pleasant life in the sun without malign intent. Freedom that hurts nobody.'

A more prosaic account of his compatriots' motivations was offered by Dermott Brereton, a television commentator and former Australian Rules football star, who described the Sari Club as filled with 'not-so-well-behaved footballers'. Some of those footballers, their identities unknown, lifted teenager Candace Buchan over a wall and out of the club after the explosion. She did not know if they survived.

The bombs were planted by a radical Islamic military group calling itself Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), which advocates an Islamic state across Southeast Asia. JI's ties to al-Qaeda included the receipt of $35,000 to fund the Bali bombing. The group's leadership pronounced itself affronted by the decadent behaviour of the Westerners at places like the Sari Club. Never mind that the majority of Balinese themselves practice a faith that is largely Hindu, with elements of Buddhism, or that their sincerest wish, expressed in a series of Web site interviews six months after the bombing, was for the return of the tourists and their money, wrote Wright.

The survivors have picked up the pieces of bodies, the arms and legs and heads. They have seen the blackened torsos of the victims, and the faces of their friends and families looking for them, frozen in shock and disbelief. The Australians who have reappeared, from places like Kingsley, return to mourn and remember, rather than to party. The locals are ready for life to return to normal, which will be unlikely for some time yet.

He is rail thin, but not scrawny. His eyes are deep-set and guarded. Simon Quayle, 33, is a solitary man in the most social of positions. As the player-coach of Kingsley Football Club, he coached around 60 footballers. There is no subtlety in his message. 'You're stagnant,' he told one of the players after training one night. 'Chances are slipping through your hands.'

Quayle became this story's unlikely focal point because it was his decision, backed by the players, to stay in Bali after the bombing to try to find their team-mates. Also, at the time, his mobile was one of the few working numbers that the Australian media were able to reach when the story broke.

Quayle says he would rather not discuss the specifics of what happened that night. But the sequence of events and choices following the explosion were captured by his wife, Norelle, in a series of text messages she stored on her mobile phone.

The explosion was reported on a midnight radio bulletin in Perth. Ninety minutes later, Norelle's mobile flashed up a text message: A huge explosion. A few dead. I will keep ringing. I love you. (1.37am.)

Four minutes later, the phone went again: 8 blokes from our crew are missing. Stokesy is one.

Jason Stokes and Simon Quayle had been friends for 12 years. At the start of the 2002 season, Stokes joined Kingsley as the club's assistant coach. He was also a close friend of another player on the trip, Brad Phillips.

Norelle - 'Norri' to her husband - texted back: What are you talking Darls.

Quayle replied: There was two huge explosions at the Sari. The whole place was on fire. We somehow survived. It was unbelievable. Please ring Bec. Big Stuey is missing as well. I will keep trying to ring.

Bec was Rebecca Ferguson, girlfriend of Stokes. Big Stuey was Anthony Stewart, another 2002 recruit, another close friend of Quayle's.
'It was amazing,' Norelle recalls. 'I just wanted to hear his voice.' But all she had was the oblique reassurance and instruction of the mobile phone's display window.

Norelle: What am I supposed to do?

Quayle: They're missing. Just explain what happened. We're checking medical places. (1.59am).

I'll keep you posted. I'm safe. (2.02am).

Norelle Quayle began to ring people she had briefly met and hardly knew to tell them something she could barely understand.

Kevin Paltridge, Corey's father, runs a stretch-limousine service. It was a Saturday night, his working day, and it had begun with the ferrying of 20 fired-up footballers to Perth Airport. He was at home and awake with his wife, Pat, when Norelle called. 'There's been a bomb blast.'

'Yeah, I know.'

'And the boys are involved.'

'I know,' Paltridge said, 'because of the location.'

'Corey's one of the ones missing.'

'I had already thought that he might be dead.'

And so, in that dreadful moment, they did what Australians of a certain age have always done in times of crisis. 'I said to Pat, 'Put the billy [kettle] on, it's going to be a long night'.' Kevin and Pat Paltridge sat down, drank their cups of tea, and waited.

The Kingsley players standing away from the dance floor of the Sari Club found a pile of wooden crates undamaged by the explosion, stacked against a wall. They climbed them to the top of the wall and then, in the words of Simon Quayle, 'Fell off a 6m drop down below. We survived that and we got out,' he told reporters four days later.

'Getting out, you could feel hands touching you,' Brad Phillips says. 'You're just trying to get out. What if I turned around? That could have been my mate there. Was it someone running behind me, or was it someone...'

Phillips, 31, remembers crawling through an exit, climbing over a fence and then clambering across a roof beam. From there to street level his memory draws a blank, although he told an Australian radio station soon after that he remembered 'a couple of guys followed me and one guy decided to jump - I don't want to talk too much about that one... My T-shirt and shorts were just covered in blood. Not mine. I don't know whose it was or how I got it. I helped a few girls... The psychologist has said I might have done something after getting off the roof that my mind didn't want me to remember. You just don't know.'

According to an account in Time magazine by fellow Australians Tansen and Mira Stannard, travelling with their grandson Sai, the headlights of their car escaping down a lane picked up a figure in shorts. Phil Britten's badly burnt skin appeared to melt before their eyes. Britten later recalled that his skin was trailing 30cm off his body, like a cape. The Stannards threw their screaming passenger into the car. There was a traffic jam, inevitably. Not far, not far, they kept telling him, as they inched towards a medical clinic.

On arrival, Britten was doused with saline, 'because I was basically still smoking'. Later, he was taken to a hospital. 'I saw a white hospital that was red with the blood of everyone - the beds, the floors, the walls. It was terrible. So many people dying and trying to survive.' He remembers attempting to wipe blood off the bed so he could lie down, 'but it just wouldn't go away'.

Ben Madden, the Kingsley vice-captain, found him there the next day. 'I was lying there, door open, flies buzzing, and trying to figure out what had happened to me,' Britten recalls. 'When [Ben] looked through and saw me, he couldn't recognise my body, but saw my eyes and knew it was me. One of the first things I said was, 'Get me out of here.''

'That's what we wanted to do, take care of him,' Madden remembers. 'The joy of it was just huge. There were so many we hadn't found, and finally finding him was just like all your Christmases come at once. Bigger than that.'

Quayle had gathered his players together and told them they would not be leaving until their team-mates had been found or identified. Their search was unavoidably haphazard. There are four hospitals and five medical clinics in Kuta and the nearby Balinese capital of Denpasar. The lists of the dead and injured were attached to walls in the hospitals. Corey Paltridge, who died on the dance floor of the Sari Club, was identified despite a misreading of the first two names on his driver's licence: Corey James.

This was the news passed on to Kevin and Pat Paltridge, and the families of the other missing players, by Quayle. 'He was our lifeline,' says Kevin. 'He gave me his number, and in the hours after it first happened he was the only line we had to Bali.'

'He was the man in control,' says Phillips. 'Simon was the one who organised everyone, kept us together. He planned everything. That's the way it went. He spoke to people in Melbourne [to the family of Anthony Stewart, one of the missing players]. He organised things in Perth. He was the middleman between the boys and the families.'

The surviving Kingsley players flew back in a private plane belonging to Perth billionaire Kerry Stokes. The bodies of their seven missing team-mates were eventually found and identified.
On his return, Quayle remained the focal point of local and media attention. In the moments after the escape from the Sari Club, the responsibility of leadership was thrust into his hands. It is a recurrent theme in his life.

There was the reinvention, along with his mates, of Kingsley, an E-grade (or fifth division) amateur club going nowhere, into one with aspirations of long-term success and prosperity. There were phone calls from Kuta to the family members of the missing, to tell them what had happened. And then the decision to stay on in Bali, sparing those families the trauma of formal identification of remains dismembered and disfigured by the blast and its fire. And then, as things quietened down back in Perth, the idea came of establishing a Web site, balifoundation.org, as an online resource for other victims of the bombing.

Those who met Quayle for the first time marvelled at how a guy who made a living washing trucks could do this. They weren't aware that he had previously overseen a division of an A$80m (£33m) retirement-funds management company. They heard the lapsed student who could not complete his secondary-school English course, not the guy who took over his father's business and turned it into an entity that could survive without him.

After the explosion, the Kingsley players helped those that they could, inside and outside the club. Both Quayle and Phillips saw others trying to escape along the roof fall to their presumed deaths. There are elements of that ordeal that remain buried and unopened in Brad Phillips' memory, like a vault of horrors, briefly opened and then slammed shut. 'You came back, but you didn't come back,' the brother of one of the victims later told him. 'We aren't the same people and we never will be,' Phillips told Gerard Wright for The Observer report.

One of the seven Kingsley players to die in the tragedy was Johnathon Wade known as “Johno.”

Kristie van den Berg will always remember her brother's cheeky grin; she thinks of him as the quintessential quiet achiever, a charmer with ample ambition, The Age reported.

The youngest of three children, 'Johno' made friends easily and loved the outdoors. He was working in four part-time jobs while studying aquaculture and agribusiness at Perth's Curtin University.

Not for him a suit and tie, or a desk job; he had just secured a work experience placement at a cod hatchery in Carnarvon in Western Australia's north-west, where he would be in his element.

But first there was an end-of-season trip to Bali with the Kingsley football club. 'He was having a great year,' Kristie says. 'He was really enjoying his footy, especially the social side of it, but there were a lot of other things going on in his life.

'He had his uni, his work, and his girlfriend (of three years), Jacqui.'

Johno did well at school and had been accepted as a member of the Golden Key International Honour Society, a group that recognises academic excellence.

He was studying marine biology but switched to aquaculture, believing the job prospects were better, The Age reported.

'He liked that sort of job because he could wear boardies and no shoes,' his sister says. 'He was the outdoors, casual type. He wasn't a suit-and-tie kind of person.'

Johno liked to be independent, so he worked part-time at a water-slide park and a supermarket, as well as at Burswood Resort Casino and for a dental technician.

'He was always on the go. He wasn't the type of person to go out for a big night and then sit at home on the couch the next day with a hangover,' his mother told The Age.

'He was very loyal and caring, which was why people were naturally drawn to him.' (Johno's brother Brett Michael Wade committed suicide some months after the Bali bombings, another victim not counted in the official death toll).

Kingsley's Corey Partridge was also declared dead, as was Stokes. The other members of the team to die were Byron Hancock, Dean Gallagher, David Ross, and Anthony Stewart.

Such was the horror of the Bali blasts and the devastation it wreaked on football teams of all codes, NRL teams the Brisbane Broncos, the Melbourne Storm, the Northern Eagles and the St George Illawarra Dragons that were due to fly to Bali the following week all cancelled their trips.

Ironically in September this year, nearly seven years after the tragedy both the Coogee Dolphins on the east coast of Australia and Kingsley far away on the West Coast, both won their respective grand finals, and on the same day. The two clubs share a special bond having lost thirteen of their members between them.

Meantime on Sunday Amrozi Nurhasyim, Ali Ghufron, and Imam Samudra faced the firing squad just after midnight Sunday at an island prison off the coast of Java.

The Bali bombers have never shown any remorse for their crimes, except to apologize for the Muslims who were killed in the bombings.

The families of those executed, and several thousand supporters, gave the militants a hero's funeral after their bodies were flown by helicopter to their hometowns in Central Java.

Families and supportrs of the victims of the bombings also gathered together. Those associated wth Kingsley Football Club met at the Kingsley tavern and then Pinnaroo Valley Memorial Park.

Kevin Paltridge, father of 20-year-old Corey was there. “It’s a relief to me that I’m not going to see these guys’ (bombers’) faces any more,” he said. “I still can’t put it in words how I feel. There will never be closure, whatever’s happened is not going to bring my young fella back.”