Two foreign visitors to Bali were killed in a landslide near the iconic Jatiluwih rice terraces in West Bali while they slept in the early morning of Thursday, 14 March 2024.
Angelina Smith Cross (48), an Australian-American Citizen, has been identified by police, while the body of a man, who was also killed, presumed to be her companion, remains unidentified until late Thursday afternoon, 14 March 2024. Late on Thursday, police identified the dead man as 51-year-old Dutch national Luciano Kross.
Smith was originally from Melbourne but held permanent US residency. Kross reportedly lived in Indonesia together with his two sons.
The couple checked in only at 8:00 pm Wednesday, and staff planned to formally register their details at breakfast the Thursday morning.
The tragedy occurred at 4:00 am in the early morning of Thursday, 14 March 2024, while the two were sleeping in a rented room at Villa Yeh Baat in Banjar Jatiluwih Kangin, Penebel, in Tabanan Regency. The bodies of the two were transported to Professor Dr. I.G.N.G. Ngoerah General Hospital in Denpasar for examination and further disposition.
Villa Yeh Bat offers five hillside villas for rent, two of which were damaged by the landslide.
The couple are presumed to have died when hillside land collapsed, covering the small villa bedroom. The villa’s staff and neighbours only discovered the catastrophe two hours after it occurred at 6:00 am..
The soil that fell onto the villa was part of an irrigation channel above the structure. Locals said heavy rains had tripled the amount of water carried by the irrigation channel, causing the mud embankments of the channel to give way and slide down the hill and onto the villa.
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