We received confirmation in the past few minutes that two Australian friends are among those killed in this morning's Garuda plane crash in Yogyakarta.
Australian embassy public affairs officer Liz O'Neill (above, 31/12/05) was a new mum, wife to Wayne and a regular at various expat social & sporting events. We spent New Years 2005 with the pair of them and friends Tim and Sian. Liz organized the first media v Embassy staff tennis tourney a couple of years back and J and I were sitting in her backyard drinking wine back in Dec 2004 when we learned that our closest friends here has given birth to a baby boy (now my Godson). She was chatty, opinionated Australian patriot.
Morgan Mellish was the Australian Financial Review correspondent who replaced our good friend Andrew Burell last year. Although I can't say I knew him very well, we spoke professionally on a number of occasions when he was looking for information about Aceh, and chatted over beers a couple of times here in Jakarta.
I understand they were sitting together in business class when the plane landed in Yogya, bursting into flames. Passengers fleeing the aircraft – which was completely destroyed by the fire – said they were critically injured and unconscious before the catastrophic fire broke out.
There are still several unidentified bodies in the morgue at Yogyakarta's main hospital. We believe several of them are diplomats and Australian federal police who like Liz and Morgan, had traveled to Central Java to follow Foreign Minister Alexander Downer's trip to the area.
The final death toll remains unclear, somewhere between 22 and 49 of the 140 passengers and crew are reported to have died. We recognize a number of Indonesians who survived but will wait for the final names to be released before allowing ourselves to exhale.
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