A distressed New Zealand cricket captain Stephen Fleming and his team arrived home on Friday after abandoning their Pakistani tour.

A suicide car bomb blew up near their Karachi hotel on Wednesday, killing 14 people. Most of the victims were French submarine technicians but there have been claims the New Zealanders, as foreigners, could also have been the target. None of the cricketers was injured but New Zealand physiotherapist, Dayle Shackel, received a minor cut to his forearm from flying glass.

Fleming, who broke down at one point, told of seeing a man walking through the hotel lobby with a limb missing, and said the scenes around him would “haunt me for the rest of my life”.

Within two hours of the bombing, which was just ahead of the second cricket test, New Zealand Cricket (NZC) chief executive Martin Sneddon called off the tour, a decision Fleming supported.

“There’s no two ways about that. It was the correct decision and we thank Martin and the Pakistan Cricket Board for making it so quickly,” Fleming told reporters.

He said if the critics had seen the carnage they would not be arguing. “There was one guy with a limb missing walking through — which is pretty harrowing and the noises he was making obviously were quite distressing — that was also where the (team) bus was going to leave from,” he said.

Fleming said the early team bus was due to have left the hotel a few minutes after the explosion. He also had concerns when players assembled afterwards in the hotel car park.

“My scariest moment was when we reached the car park -- we huddled in a group of about eight -- that left a lot of players unaccounted for,” he said.

Coach Denis Aberhart said suggestions that the New Zealand team might have been the target had been checked out and were not thought to be true.