'Tornado Terror' reports The New Zealand Herald, with one man flung to his death in Albany.
The 'Herald' says he was hurled into the air by 200km per hour winds and slammed into a concrete carpark. A student nurse tells how she desperately tried to save his life.
The Dominion Post says 'debris was everywhere.'
Alongside pictures of flying iron, damaged buildings and mangled cars, the paper says stunned shoppers wandered among the ruins.
St John Ambulance personnel describe scenes of chaos, with a number of critically injured people to deal with.
The Press leads with the moment the deadly twister struck with eyewitness accounts from shoppers who saw cars thrown through the air, as a black funnel descended.
They say the worst of the tornado lasted for 20 seconds over Albany, before moving away towards Auckland.
And her friends apparently call her a 'disaster magnet'. Marie O'Connell lived through Hurricane Katrina, survived the Canterbury earthquakes and saw the tornado as she visited the Albany shopping centre.
The Otago Daily Times has accounts from two bystanders who described the sound of rolling thunder 'like a plane approaching' as they watched the tornado coming.
Nathan Grey says it looked as if the sky had split with light on one side and clouds on the other, before the wind spiralled through.
Other news
[The Dominion Post reports the White House has issued a photograph of Vice President Joe Biden, President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton monitoring the strike on Osama bin Laden's compound.
The Herald says the al Qaeda leader was spotted by facial recognition software as far back as last September, as he exercised in his Pakistani compound.
A large mural hidden for more than 100 years has Dunedin archaeologists excited.
The ODT reports the mural was discovered during demolition of the Port Chalmers Garrison hall, which was built in 1887 for naval and military volunteers.
