Who bombed the Hilton? (34 page)

This extraordinary information, while potentially hearsay, does appear to unleash a kind of last hurrah from the original investigation teams. Special Branch and the New South Wales police decide they are going to have one more red-hot go at solving the crime, arresting the bastards and finding the evidence that will stand up in court.

To kick things off, our Detective Inspector Norm Sheather, who has been sent to patrol country pastures for a number of years, steps defiantly and proactively back into view.

May 1983

In May 1983, six months after the capsized inquest, the New South Wales police request a meeting with ASIO. They make it clear that they are seeking ASIO's assistance in ‘considering whether information held by ASIO might be used to prosecute those persons indicted for the Hilton bombing'.
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Up until this point the police and Special Branch believe they have only been given partial access to ASIO's intelligence. The Deputy Director-General of ASIO agrees that ASIO can reveal its holdings, but only on the condition that the police neither copy nor physically retain this information and, disappointingly, that none of the information is ‘to be used in the police prosecution'.

On 7 or 8 June 1983 Norm Sheather reappears. He is representing the New South Wales police Hilton investigation team, and he and Inspector Young of Special Branch sit down with ASIO for a parley. ASIO
warns the men that the material is sensitive and some of it could ‘have resulted from attempts by the Ananda Marga to test the source, and could therefore be 100 per cent inaccurate'.
²
ASIO shows them 36 intelligence items relating to both the Hilton bombing and to Yagoona. Sheather realises immediately that many of these items have already been passed on to the New South Wales police orally between 1978 and 1981. What is new is ‘a Margii's reported admission concerning the purchase of the explosives used in the bombing', and some talk about the police interviewing Margii members ‘Citisvarupa' and ‘Suvod' about the explosives.
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However, Norm remains unswayed. He looks at the information and it is clearly more of the same bits of tantalising, unverifiable chatter doomed to fail in court. He is damning in his assessment. He tells the ASIO officer at the meeting that he regards their material relating to the Hilton bombing ‘overall, as having little probative value'.

ASIO seem somewhat taken aback and ask him if it would help the police ‘if ASIO put the agent on the stand?' Sheather will not be moved, perhaps to him it sounds like Richard Seary all over again. His reply is that even with the full cooperation of an agent, this ‘would not' secure a conviction.
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Unlike Sheather, Special Branch, ever hopeful, and feasibly smarting even more from the blows that have rained down on them since the revelations
about Seary at the inquest, refuse to be so pessimistic. Instead they come up with a plan, which on the surface appears considered and quite brilliant. They will marry hard science to strong circumstantial intelligence and crack the thing wide open.

What they propose is this. With the help of Australia's best scientists, along with ASIO, they will conduct exhaustive comparative testing on every available bit of physical evidence taken from the series of bombings or attempted bombings, including the bits of wire and such recovered from the Hilton, that occurred throughout 1978.

The strength of the idea is that this time Special Branch recruits arm's length experts with distinguished and impossible-to-dispute credentials to lead the investigation.

The scientific team is headed by Dr Malcolm Hall of the Australian Federal Police Forensic Science Research Unit and Dr Hilton J Kobus from the Department of Chemistry at the Australian National University, Canberra. These men are invited to the Special Branch Ballistics Unit, Scientific and Technical Services, where they view ‘a number of exhibits and other components of improvised explosive devices'. The purpose of the visit is to ‘ascertain whether the exhibits were worthy of scientific comparison tests to establish similarities between bombing and attempted bombing incidents'.
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The scientists are asked to compare debris found at the Hilton bombing on 13 February 1978 — wires, battery pieces and sundry items (which you'll remember were difficult to identify definitively as part of a bomb and not simply refuse from the garbage truck) — with materials from the bomb found at the Indian High Commission on 25 March 1978, the bomb components from the police headquarters explosion on 18 May 1978, the bomb found in the back of the car with Alister, Dunn and Seary at Yagoona on 15 June 1978, and finally the contents of the University of New South Wales locker discovered on 28 April 1981 (but rented on 11 July 1978). It is the belief of Special Branch that ‘all the bombs were partly made from components found in the cache at the University of New South Wales'.
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The good news is that Hall and Kobus are in agreement that there ‘is an excellent chance of identifying similarities existing between the explosive devices'. The scientists go on to suggest a dizzying series of tests that they believe will yield results. Among the array of experiments, certain comparative tests will be carried out on the Hilton debris by a process of ‘neutron activation analysis at the Atomic Energy Commission at Lucas Heights' and other ‘analytical tests will also be carried out on the gelignite located at the University of New South Wales, and that recovered at Yagoona … at the Analytical Laboratories, Lidcombe …
arrangements are made with the Dangerous Goods Branch to have the explosives transported to the Laboratories'.
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The fervent desire is that these tests will provide some physical link to the ‘information [that] has been received from a confidential source, which indicates that members of Ananda Marga, other than those already mentioned [i.e. not Anderson, Alister or Dunn], are involved with the various incidents shown in this report'.
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The moment the series of sophisticated experiments on the various bombs, exploded and unexploded, are approved and set in motion, disaster strikes.

Two days after the report requesting the tests is compiled, Special Branch issues a request to ASIO. They ask if Detectives Henderson and Helson could be allowed to examine all ‘transcripts of technical surveillance carried out on Ananda Marga premises in Australia, one week prior to, and one week after' (a) the Hilton bombing, (b) the attempted bombing of the Indian High Commission, (c) the bombing of the New South Wales Police Headquarters, (d) the Yagoona incident, and (e) the discoveries of the explosives cache at the University of New South Wales.
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That doesn't seem a lot to ask, does it? Especially as ASIO seem to have been bending over backwards to cooperate a month earlier when they showed Sheather and Young their ‘36 items' of interest.

But they don't cooperate. The request is flatly refused. The way ASIO puts it is: ‘In regard to the police request for our technical product, our review found no relevant information, and, as unevaluated and unprocessed product obtained under ASIO's special powers should not be made available to people outside ASIO, it was an easy decision to deny that access.'
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Special Branch refuse to give up. However, once again, they fail to take note that the cautious Detective Inspector Sheather, as in the recruitment of Seary, is no longer beside them in this endeavour.

The tests will take over a year to complete and are carried out on every filament and fibre, every wire, every piece of gelignite, plus the batteries, the masking tape, the bags, the newspaper and the maroon balaclava found inside the blue bag at Yagoona. Dr Hall is particularly optimistic about what will be learnt from the detonators, which ‘are important evidence linking four of the events'.
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Testing takes place in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide at a range of institutions including the Australian Bomb Data Centre, the South Australian Forensic Science Centre, the University of Adelaide, the Australian Federal Police in Canberra along with the Atomic Energy Commission and the Analytical Laboratories in Sydney.

There are dozens of scientists involved, from Dr Kenneth Brown from the Department of Dentistry
who is an expert in operating ‘video-superimposition equipment',
¹²
to Lloyd Ernest Mulholland of the New South Wales Fingerprint Section and Dr Roger Shackleton of the Australian Bomb Data Centre.
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The test methodologies involve, to name a few, a nanospectrometer (colour), a pyrolysis mass spectrometer, high performance liquid chromatography and microscopy neutron activation analysis.
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There are detailed charts, columns and spreadsheets that align common items found at each site. Four of them have yellow wire, two have a similar printing defect on the gelignite labels, three have battery clips.
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In short, it is impossible to question just how exhaustive the scientific analysis on these five bomb incidents is.

When the findings are collated and presented in October 1984 they are horribly ambivalent. Reading them it's hard to comprehend suggestions in the future that if they had been presented at either the Section 475 inquiry in 1984–85 or at Anderson's trial or appeal in 1989–90 the outcome of each would have been radically different. From the evidence I simply can't see how these assertions hold weight. For example:

Summary of the Results.

This kind of measured analysis continues from Dr Kobus: ‘It is not possible to form an opinion as to a common point of construction for the bombs from examination of fragments of material such as those reported.' Kobus concluded:

Other separate comparative reports from scientists Ms AE Paraybyk, Mr RJ Lokan and Mr GB Smith, using different methodologies including microspectrophotometry, pyrolysis mass spectrometry and microscopy for physical detail, result in similar conclusions: ‘the value of [the] similarity is limited … the match … is not strong associative evidence',
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‘could have a common origin but the possibility of different sources cannot be excluded',
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‘these results indicate that the red and black plastic wires in the Yagoona incident originated from a different source to [those] … in the Indian High Commission incident'.
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Nonetheless, while the scientists from the South Australian Forensic Science Centre can find no strong evidence supporting a link between the bombs, nor evidence that the bombs from the Hilton, Indian High Commission, police headquarters and Yagoona were manufactured from components in the cache found at the University of New South Wales, John Harold Goulding from the Neutron Activation Analysis Section of the AFP is having more success.
Goulding's focus is on identifying whether the trace elements of any of the grey or yellow detonator wire found at the various sites are similar. The virtue of the test is the principle that ‘when two or more samples exhibit the same trace element profile it indicates that they were produced in the same synthetic batch. This holds whether the samples are copper wire, glass, paint or heroin.'
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Goulding subjects the wires to the neutron activation analysis. He concludes that the components of the grey wires are too variable for comparison but finds that: