Springvale bank blast: Witnesses recount moments after explosion

PHALLA Neary Khmer was visting the bank in Springvale with her three children when it turned pitch black and the smell of petrol and burning flesh quickly filled the room.

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PHALLA Neary Khmer was visting the Commonwealth Bank in Springvale with her three children when it became pitch black, smoke and the smell of petrol and burning flesh quickly filled the room.

The emergency door of the Commonwealth Bank had slammed down, trapping customers inside.

Khmer, 36, from Springvale South, said all she could see was the man well alight, running up and down the room.

“All you could see was him, he was all burnt,” Ms Kim said.

“All his clothes just dripped off and his skin, it just fell piece by piece on the carpet.”

Phalla Neary Khmer and her young son Fyta were victims in the incident. Picture: Facebook

She was visiting the bank with her three children, Claudia, 18, Angel, 16 and baby Fyta, 2, to set up a bank account for Angel who’d just gotten a new job.

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The baby boy clung to his older sister, whimpering and coughing - Angel found a crack under a door with clean air coming through.

“Angel put my baby’s head on the floor so he could breathe in the little gap and get fresh air,” Ms Khmer said.

“I was thinking I can’t believe my son is going to have such a short life.”

Her friend Sophie Mach was standing closest to the offender at the entrance to the building, and saw him try to light a match.

“He didn’t say anything but he looked at us like, ‘I’m going to die today and you’re all going to die with me’,” Ms Mach said.

HERO REVEALS SUSPECT’S WORDS AFTER BANK BLAST

SIX police investigators stand outside the black hole that used to be the front door of the Commonwealth Bank in Springvale.

A forensics officer tags and bags a black cap sitting on the road, GANGSTER emblazoned on its peak.

They’re trying to make sense of what happened a few hours earlier, when the glass doors exploded and smoke palled and men and women ran screaming into the street.

At some point, they’ll talk to Ash Atkin-Fone, the first person on the scene, and a certain hero in an otherwise uncertain turn of events.

An image captured out the back of the bank just after the blast.

A hat with Gangster written on it is seen at the Commonwealth Bank Springvale. Picture Julian Smith/AAP

It wasn’t a fire, he says, as the reports kept perpetuating yesterday afternoon. It was a blast. A little before lunch. The sort of crunching bang that from about 100m away — at least according to Noel Rebello, sounded a lot like a car accident.

Atkin-Fone was knocking in a peg, and running a team laying pipes in a laneway across the road, when he looked up.

He saw a man, perhaps 25, run on to the street. He was shrieking. The man’s skin was peeling, in a sight that Atkin-Fone was still trying to process late yesterday afternoon.

It seemed the victim had copped the fullness of the explosion.

Atkin-Fone didn’t think, not with any analytical reflection, anyway.

Later, he spoke about wanting to usher “innocent people” out of danger. Of split seconds reactions and of instinct.

Atkin-Fone rushed towards the smoke and the alarms and the panic.

Two women appeared on the street from the blackness, with a child. They, too, were injured, perhaps from the shards of glass. He recalls their blackened faces.

He saw flames, though they weren’t menacing, where an interior ATM was melting and light fixtures had fallen.

Emergency Services enter the burnt out bank branch. Picture: Michael Dodge/Getty

Ashley Atkin-Fone at the scene at Springvale Commonwealth Bank after a man allegedly started a fire injuring himself and dozens of people. Picture: David Geraghty

He rushed next door to the bank, to the Optus store, and grabbed a large fire extinguisher. He ran into “Mitch”, who yesterday remained a mysterious but welcome presence on the scene.

Mitch was not in the bank but passing by on the street. He, too, warrants recognition for his choices over the following few minutes.

Atkin-Fone and Mitch conferred. Mitch would help those inside out the back exit. Atkin-Fone dashed in the front.

He couldn’t see anything, bar the flames, which he easily doused.

He screamed and yelled but suspects that no one heard him. Most of the people in the bank got out through the back, he says.

“All I could see was black smoke,” he says. “I didn’t know if another bomb was going to off or what.”

Afterwards, he spoke again with Mitch, who said that he had spoken with the person responsible for the blast.

That man was among the bank’s back exit exodus. He, like many others, had skin hanging off from burns. But he was lucid, according to Mitch.

“They didn’t give me no money,” Mitch recounted the man told him to Atkin-Fone. “I’ve got no money for food.”

By yesterday afternoon, one line of inquiry led to a possible purchase of accelerant at one of several nearby service stations. A guard stood outside the closed NAB branch across the road from the Commonwealth Bank, good-naturedly recounting the long walk from his parked car.

A man was captured on CCTV walking down the street with a petrol container.

The guard didn’t understand the job description when he was called to the job at 1pm, perhaps reflecting the wider shock and confusion yesterday. How do you explain what happened?

But, given it happened in a suburban bank branch, it could have happened to anyone, anywhere.

Gawkers on Springvale Rd kept throwing up the terrorism question. They milled within the blocked roads and empty streets.

The owner of a nearby shop selling teas gladly showed posted videos of the moments after the blast, when onlookers clumped in groups, looking confused and sirens blared.

A friend of a friend had been in the bank, she said, including the woman’s little boy. All had been hospitalised but the shop owner had heard they were OK.

Stephen Beck had been walking towards the scene when he was confronted by a rush of panicked people. He almost told one man in a suit to slow down. Then he heard the screams.

He stood outside the bank before authorities arrived, agape as victims sobbed and bottles of water were poured on their faces.

“At first I thought someone had been knocked down,” he said of the uproar. “I looked in the bank and it was as black as spades.”

Atkin-Fone returned to his labours across the road after the bank drama.

He brushed aside a colleague’s “hero” label then left soon afterwards as his sense of trauma deepened.

Rebello, who was down the street, was suffering his own kind of shock yesterday. He was walking towards the bank when the blast occurred. A minute later, he would have been outside the black doors.

Beck, meanwhile, was recounting his own what-if scenario. “I was in there (the bank) yesterday.”

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