The evening of October 12, 2002, started out like any other Saturday night in Bali - it was hot, and the streets were packed with tourists, hawkers and locals.
Bars were crowded with people keen to have a good time - there were end-of-season footy trips, girls' trips, family trips, honeymooners and one-in-a-lifetime holidaymakers.
At 11.08 pm, everything changed.
A suicide bomber detonated an improvised explosive device (IED) on the ground floor of Paddy's Bar, right near the DJ box. The building, full of holidaymakers, was engulfed in fire, and survivors rushed outside.
Just 15 seconds later, a van laden with 1.2 tonnes of explosives was detonated outside the Sari Club. It was only 40 metres up the road from Paddy's.
There were around 350 people inside the Sari Club. The blast caused extensive damage and a fireball accelerated by the club's thatched roofing.
Then, 40 seconds later, there was a third explosion. This bomb was detonated 11 kilometres away, near the United States consulate in Renon (Denpasar).
The explosions killed 202 people from 22 countries, including 88 Australians. The youngest Australian to die was just 13 years old.
A further 209 were wounded, and 66 were flown to Darwin for treatment.
Greek Australian Maria Kotronakis nonetheless desires the terrorist's lifeless
It's the time of the yr when the sensation of dread returns, and Maria Kotronakis turn anxious and moody.
It’s not that she doesn’t assume daily concerning the four cherished relations she misplaced within the 2002 Bali bombings after her personal life was spared by coincidence.
But yearly, because the tragic anniversary approaches, the anger turns extra pronounced, and he or she finds herself apologising to folks for her brief mood.
‘It’s simply my coping mechanism,’ she says.
However, she makes no apologies for wanting the entire terrorists accountable lifeless.
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the deaths of Maria’s identical twin Dimitra (Dimmy), then 27, older sister Elizabeth, 33, and her cousins Louiza Zervos, 33, and Christine Betmalik, 29, within the single largest household tragedy of the horrific bombings.
They had joined Maria on her honeymoon in Bali. They had been on an evening out within the Sari Club at Kuta Beach on October 12, 2002, when Islamic terrorists detonated two bombs that killed 202 folks, together with 88 Australians.
Now aged 47, Maria empathises with everybody who had mother and father, youngsters, siblings, and pals obliterated in Australia’s most significant peacetime tragedy.
The devastation on Jalan Legian, the principle avenue at Kuta Beach, after the mass murders
But she can not ‘transfer on’, as some folks recommend.
‘If you don’t like my opinion, that’s superb,’ Maria advised Daily Mail Australia this week via tears for the ladies she calls ‘my sisters, my angels, my all the pieces.
‘If folks damage me, I want them dying. (The bombers) ought to all have been executed,’ she mentioned.
‘We didn’t get to say goodbye to our family before they died. The three who have been executed mentioned, given the prospect, they’d do it once more.’
Maria Kotronakis is all too accustomed to the names of the boys concerned within the bombing plot, particularly the three Javanese brothers Ali Imron, Ali Ghufron (aka Muklas), and the ghastly ‘smiling bomber’ Amrozi.
Ghufron and Amrozi were executed by firing squad together with Imam Samudra in November 2008.
‘The third brother Ali Imron received life because he confirmed regret and requested forgiveness,’ Maria mentioned.
'He should have been executed too - but if you're going to keep him in jail, put him down a hole with no contact with the outside and just throw food and drink into the hole.
'They were cowards who ran away after killing everyone, and then the motherf***ers got hunted down and caught.
'They don't deserve our precious oxygen.'
Maria flew to Bali on Monday, October 7, 2002.
Elizabeth, Dimmy, Christine - Maria's three bridesmaids - and Louiza followed the next day.
They were a lively group among many families and friends enjoying the week in Bali leading up to Saturday, October 12.
After racing each other in the pool, shopping and enjoying dinner and drinks, Maria was struck down by a migraine on Saturday evening and decided to stay at the hotel.
At 9 pm, Elizabeth, Dimmy, Christine and Louiza headed for Jalan Legian, the main street at Kuta Beach, where Australians and other tourists crammed into the Sari Club and Paddy's Irish Bar.
The girls, who loved to dance, opted for the Sari Club, where between 300 and 350 people, mostly Australians, packed the dance floor.
None of the revellers were aware that two weeks earlier, an Indonesian al-Qaeda group called Jemaah Islamiah had cased the venues, making plans for bombs intended to cause maximum carnage.
Preparatory meetings were held in western Java during August and September for a plot ten months in the planning and involving at least 25 people, including bomb makers, a field coordinator, suicide bombers and chemical buyers.
At 11.06 pm, a young man named Iqbal walked into Paddy's Irish Bar and at 11.07 detonated the 5kg of TNT in his backpack.
This caused many inside, including the injured, to surge into the street where, 30 seconds later, a white Mitsubishi L300 van packed with 700kg of explosives parked outside the Sari Club exploded.
The blast was so powerful it registered on Indonesian seismographs as a fireball engulfed the club's thatched roof.
Early the following day, Vicky Kotronakis called Maria from Sydney to say she couldn't track down the other girls.
Mrs Kotronakis had learned about the bombs overnight but was trying to be strong for her newlywed daughter.
At Denpasar's Sanglah Hospital, where the injured and the dead were taken, desperate relatives set up boards with lists of missing people and their physical descriptions.
Many survivors had dreadful injuries, mostly terrible burns from which some would later die. Outside, the already dead lay under ice, blankets and bags in Sanglah's makeshift morgue.
Maria couldn't find her four loved ones among any of them.
'By Monday night, I knew they were dead,' Maria said.
Flying home without them was hard, and waiting with her parents for their remains to be identified and returned back to Australia was harder.
'But at least we got them home, or bits of them,' Maria said.
'We were lucky we got all four girls back. Some families didn't get any remains at all.'
Bali police chief General I Made Pastika, and his officers would identify 25 Indonesians believed responsible for the attacks, and in 2003 trials in the island's capital, Denpasar, would begin.
At these court hearings, the three brothers would become infamous to Australians for their laughing disdain for the horror and destruction they caused.
At his trial, the bombings field commander Imam Samudra walked from the court after he was sentenced to death, yelling 'Allah Akbar' (god is great) and 'Muslim people, destroy Christians, destroy America, destroy Jews'.
For Maria, the lack of remorse meant the Bali bombers 'lost their rights to anything that's human'.
'We lost four beautiful girls who did nothing wrong. Normal people that would get up and go to work every day, live life as much as they could and enjoy themselves,' she said.
'There was nothing the girls ever did wrong to have been executed the way they were.
'I know that people talk about the Abdallah family forgiving the driver (Samuel Davidson, who killed four children in the 2020 Oatlands crash) and one of the families forgiving the driver in the Buxton crash.
'They were accidents. This was deliberate.'
Maria knows the exact spot where her sisters were dancing when they died, and it is her special spot to go to when she visits Bali.
She is appalled that a foreign developer's plans for a bar and shopping centre could override plans for a permanent peace park.
'I know where they are,' she said.
'I know where they were standing. I feel at peace there.
'You're going to put a bar where my sisters died on soil that has blood in it?'
She had planned to go to Bali for this year's 20th anniversary, but financial issues kept her at home, and she will attend the ceremony at the Coogee memorial in Sydney.
She will go back to Bali when she can afford to and go to St James Park in London, where her loved ones' names are engraved into a sandstone wall with the other victims' on a memorial unveiled by King Charles in 2006.
