Ten Years Later- Remembering the Australian Tourist (Part One of Two)

"She died alone and all her family got was a letter" was the headline of a story that ran in the Aug. 7, 2007, edition of "The Brisbane Times," which had published a "Sydney Morning News" story from that day about Amanda Rigg.

I had never met Rigg, who was a 22-year-old Australian tourist traveling in Istanbul. But, we walked down the same street in the busy Taksim district of Istanbul near a Chinese restaurant on Sept. 10, 2001, some 10-15 minutes apart.

I was in my since-deceased aunt's apartment that we heard the blast around 5:00 p.m. At the time, we were packing to go Buyukada, an island off the coast of Istanbul. The blast would turn out to be from a suicide bomber, though we weren't entirely positive of that at the time. In fact, I had read in a Turkish newspaper the next day, a mere 20 minutes before I found out about the Twin Towers, that the suicide bomber was a woman. While researching this piece, I found out that the bomber was actually a man named Ugur Bumbul.

Bumbul died in the blast as did two Turkish police officers whom I had seen alive just a quarter-hour before their untimely, unexpected deaths.

Rigg turned out to be the third victim of the blast, but she did not die on the moment of impact. She had lost one of her arms, and she went to a hospital. I would not know of Rigg's death which happened a few days after Sept. 10th until a shopkeeper in ther resort town of Kusadasi, some seven hours south of Istanbul, informed me of the tragic news.

Long before arriving in Turkey, we had planned to go to Kusadasi. And even in the nice tranquil Aegean beaches of Kusadasi, it was hard not to think about what happened and then what happened next.

PERSONAL NOTE: This is the end of Part One. For the sake of the privacy of my family members and brevity, some personal details, such as the fact that we were at a bank before going to my aunt's apartment, were not included.

Tomorrow, I hope to post information about the struggles that Rigg's family faced in Australia in the aftermath of the Sept. 10th Istanbul bomb blast through Internet research.

Initially, this was planned to be a three-part series, but I've decided to shorten it to two simpler entries.