Bali bombing victims urge harsh sentences for Malaysian men for ‘savage destruction of life’

Perth resident Phil Britten, 43, recounted how his first holiday abroad turned into horror when seven of the 19 friends he had been travelling with were killed.

“I was the captain of the Kingsley Football Club, and we were all celebrating the end of a successful season of Australian Rules Football,” he said in his statement. “It was to be the trip of a lifetime. But for many of us, it ended up being the trip that either ended or forever changed our lives.”

Britten, then 22, was inside the Sari Club when a one-tonne bomb hidden in a van went off in front of the establishment. A suicide bomber also attacked the adjacent Paddy’s Pub, while a third explosion took place outside the US consulate in the nearby Renon district.

“After crawling out of the burning ruins and across a roof, I was taken to hospital by a family who found me, running in the middle of a road with skin hanging off my body in strips,” Britten said in his statement.

“But the hospital was by no means a place where I could survive as it was overwhelmed by the scale of those burned, dying, [with] missing limbs and bleeding out.”

Britten said he experienced burns to 60 per cent of his body and underwent multiple skin grafts and back operations. His rehabilitation took years, during which he had to wear full-length burn pressure garments and follow a regimen of “excruciating” physiotherapy.

“Mentally and emotionally, I wanted my life to end for years. It took all the strength that I had to physically survive, and then afterwards, it was a struggle to move beyond the trauma and nightmare of the ruins my life had been left in,” he added.

Britten urged the judge to punish Farik and Nazir to the fullest extent of the law.

“I ask the judge to place the full and maximum