Who bombed the Hilton?

by Rachel Landers

  While it might be obvious to Norm Sheather that things are over, there are players on both sides who continue to provoke and goad each other. It’s not an easy break-up to watch or to track. After Kumar leaves Australia in late 1978 he becomes harder and harder to detect as the years roll by. That said, like all his appearances in the past, when he does pop his head up, it’s always an astonishing, show-stopping performance.

  For Norm Sheather, the arrest of the Yagoona Three, Seary’s subsequent allegations and the confiscation of Kumar’s Brandon passport coincide with the conclusion of the major Hilton operation around ‘August, 1978’.1 Eventually we will learn Norm’s view on the matter but at the time it passes unreported.

  From the start it’s clear that Abhiik Kumar has no real desire to shift his base from Australia to destinations unknown. Despite the return of his passport and jaunt to India, he seems reluctant to slip away. He will claim in years to come that immediately prior to the reissuing of his restricted passport he was flown to Canberra — at the ‘taxpayers’ expense’ and possibly at the behest of Malcolm Fraser — for a tête à tête with the Foreign Minister Andrew Peacock at Parliament House. After being chauffeured to this cosy meeting, Abhiik claims that Peacock did a deal with him: if he accepted a three-month restricted passport, then a six-month one would be issued and finally, presumably if he behaved, he’d be given a full passport.

  Apparently motivating such reasonableness is a complaint Abhiik had filed with the Commonwealth Ombudsman about the original passport cancellation, citing relentless political persecution. He argued, ‘Not many Australians with no criminal record and no charges or jail time pending have their passport revoked. The confiscation of my passport was an abuse of power that simply could not stand.’2

  Fighting words. But Peacock and Fraser deny such a meeting ever took place.3

  Playing the aggrieved party seems to come naturally to Kumar. Even on his restricted passport he is still determined both to wield his power and proclaim his injured status. By January 1979 he is abruptly back in Australia and in the headlines. Since their June 1978 arrests, Anderson, Alister and Dunn have repeatedly asked for visits from their spiritual advisor, Abhiik Kumar. This request is granted, but only if prison warders at Long Bay jail — citing security concerns — are allowed to observe the visits. The trio object vehemently and embark on a hunger strike in September 1978. By January this has stretched to four months and has Anderson and Alister in the prison hospital. Dunn too begins a fast but this has ended by the time the fracas hits the papers.4

  The hunger strike sets the state Public Service Board, the Department of Corrective Services and the Long Bay prison officers at each other’s throats. By mid-January 1979, the dispute ends up before a judge, Justice Dey, in a closed session as he attempts to weigh up the security concerns of the guards and the rights of the incarcerated men. An editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald points out:

  It must be remembered that the accused have not yet been tried, let alone found guilty. A prima facie case has been made out against them on charges of conspiracy to murder [Cameron], and they will stand trial on February 19, more than five months after their committal. This is a long time to wait without the moral or spiritual support they seek.5

  The editor does recognise that while the Ananda Marga may not evoke much on the public sympathy front, he does add that were the prisoners members of an ‘orthodox religion’, the refusal of visits from their minister would produce howls of protest.

  What is so intriguing about this stand-off is how agitated the mere idea of Kumar makes the — presumably hard-nosed — prison guards of Long Bay jail. While Justice Dey is reported as being ‘satisfied that the concern of the prison staff was genuinely held’, and that ‘the actions of the members of the sect have contributed to the attitude adopted by the prison officers’, he nonetheless orders the guards to allow the sect leader into the jail at least on a trial basis. However, the guards simply refuse to accept Judge Dey’s ruling. Instead, the Long Bay jail officers appeal to the full bench of the state Industrial Commission against the order. They really don’t want Kumar in their jail. While the extremism of the hunger strike must be unsettling, what leaks out from behind the closed hearings is that what the officers are really afraid of is the ‘anticipated brain-washing of one of the members’ and ‘the possible consequences of this’; that somehow Kumar will, during a visit, use his mind control on one or all of the trio and order them to attack.6

  The editor of the Sydney Morning Herald asks exactly how the now stick-thin prisoners — two of them in wheelchairs — ‘brainwashed’ or not, are supposed to carry out these imagined assaults upon warders after Kumar has wandered through. ‘Is the public to suppose that security is so weak at Long Bay that warders cannot live with the vague possibility of violence which may never appear?’7

  Despite the scaredy-cat taunts from the Herald, I think what set the warders on edge was that they got intelligence about Kumar from their colleagues in the police force that painted a portrait of a man they would do well to be afraid of.

  Whether those in charge are gun-shy because of the chaos over Kumar’s passport, the spiritual leader of the Australasian Margiis is eventually allowed to enter the prison. It’s possible the authorities also want to stamp out any behaviour that emulates tactics used by imprisoned ANC and IRA members around the globe that might characterise these incarcerated men as political prisoners.

  The capitulation of the Long Bay prison staff to the visits is a short-lived victory for the sect leader. Kumar’s three-month passport is set to expire in early March 1979 and there are claims that unnamed ‘authorities’ (Interpol? ASIO?) attempt to arrest him in Nepal around this time.8 While evidence of this is sketchy, there are reports of him in Sydney throughout 1979. Detective Senior Constable Allan David Henderson says he speaks to Kumar in passing a number of times that year: on 19 February and twice between 9 July and 1 August 1979 during the court appearances of Alister, Anderson and Dunn.9

  At the same time as this argy-bargy is going on about the human and spiritual rights of prisoners, the first anniversary of the Hilton bombing rolls by. It’s a surprisingly muted event with a memorial gathering arranged by Sydney City Council workers remembering their dead. However, one voice rings out loud and clear up the coast in Newcastle. Detective Inspector Norm Sheather who, subsequent to his incredulous interviews with Seary in June and July 1978, has been virtually silent, makes the incendiary statement to the Sydney Morning Herald that the ‘police knew who was responsible’ for the Hilton bombing.

  Norm Sheather, who is poised to take up his new duties as Detective Inspector of North-Eastern Police, a much calmer and quieter job than running the ‘100 man Hilton task force’, goes on to make the assertion that ‘he was confident the people responsible would eventually be charged’. He adds, ‘We knew who did it from the first day after the bombing, but lack of evidence to stand up in court has prevented us from making arrests … We know that three and possibly four individuals were involved …’ The article goes on to report that one of the biggest problems in obtaining evidence against the Hilton bombers was that no ingredients from the bomb were found. Sheather concludes by arguing, ‘had we found even a small fragment we could have had something to work with in collecting evidence’.10

  The effect of this provocative statement on Abhiik Kumar is unknown.

  The next time the sect leader pops his head up, he is apparently in West Germany, where some time around late 1979 there are allegations of another attempt to arrest him. By 1980, after the conviction of his three comrades back in Sydney for conspiracy to murder Cameron, Kumar is still reportedly fighting for the renewal of his Australian passport and seeks asylum in Sweden. He will claim that under pressure from the Swedish Government the Australians do renew his passport, but again the evidence is flimsy and inconclusive.11 From this point on I can find no indication that he ever returns to Australia.

  From now on he will flit in and out
of view. A ghost. But he’ll turn up. He may have escaped Norm’s clutches. He has not escaped mine.

  The next time the spotlight finds this complex man scuttling through the archives will be during the 1982 Hilton coronial inquest, where his existence will be made known to a broad Australian audience for the first time.

  What fascinates me about the years 1978–82 is how completely bifurcated the public knowledge of the sect, the bombing and the investigation are from the private experiences of those on the inside. On the first anniversary of the bombing, the name Abhiik Kumar means absolutely nothing to the Australian public. It sets off no clanging in anyone’s chest, it raises no eyebrows, hearts don’t quicken, journalists don’t breathe in sharply when it appears in print. Yet to this point he has been ever-present in the archives — front and centre and, more to the point, the focus of the Hilton task force and Norm Sheather. How can someone so intrinsic to the case vanish so effortlessly?

  Do all the parties, Special Branch, ASIO, the Commonwealth Police, the task force, the government, et al decide that near enough is good enough? Do they all sit down and think, fuck this bastard Kumar, what’s the quickest way to get rid of him? Let’s get him on a plane and out of the bloody country. Let’s shut the gate, slam the door. We’ve locked up a few of them, we’re probably never going to nail him — time to move on.

  I ponder what my comrade Norm Sheather makes of all this. Is he happy to relinquish this beleaguered case, or does something continue to gnaw away at him?

  The Hilton archives of 1979 provide a glimpse of a dramatic shift of perspective in the ongoing, if it can even be described as such, investigation of the Hilton bombing. Distinct from the muscular early days of positioning the case as part of a potential international inquiry that is open ended and forward thinking, things go abruptly into reverse. There is an unsigned, half-typed, half-hand-written dossier entitled Notes & Criminal History of Ananda Marga, which laboriously compiles and annotates every criminal act alleged or proven to be carried out by Ananda Marga around the world between March 1973 and February 1979 — a total of 69 events are listed.12 Some of these are not such a big deal in and of themselves, such as No. 47, which lists the deportation of Lynette Phillips from India and Bangladesh, and others that are new, such as No. 54, describing the alleged attempt in February 1979 by three Ananda Marga members to hijack and destroy a USSR aeroplane between Oslo and Moscow, a plan which is thwarted when the hijackers are ‘overpowered by passengers and Soviet security men’ in Stockholm.13

  Nonetheless, this document, which also includes tiny crabbed hand-written quotes from a variety of sect writings suggesting a propensity for violence among members, feels like an exercise in intense frustration. It’s as if the author can’t believe the case has hit such rocky shores and its chief antagonist has effectively jumped ship, and is thus compelled, like the Ancient Mariner, to recite the past in all its minutiae. It also reads as if it is prepared for new eyes — perhaps as justification for what is perceived publicly as a failed case. There is something plaintive, if urgent, in the tone of the final paragraph of the ‘Researchers Opinion’ attached to the dossier. The unnamed writer states:

  I do not believe that the group will be eradicated or made peaceful until the circumstances which spawned the AM are conected [sic]. There must have been far more attacks on persons and organisations that they regard as lacking in ‘moral spirit’ than have been attributed to Ananda Marga. Most unattributed acts are still under investigation and research continues.14

  Except research doesn’t really continue. This is clear from the next document that emerges, the oddly titled Resumé of the Hilton Hotel Bombing, dated 24 October 1979, a kind of summing up of the investigation. Even odder is deciphering the purpose of the résumé.15

  It is generated two months after the sentencing of Anderson, Alister and Dunn on 8 August 1979 to 16 years apiece for the conspiracy to murder Cameron (remember, no charges have been laid against them in relation to the Hilton bombing) and exudes the aura of a housekeeping exercise. It is a carefully typed summary that leads the reader through all the key points of the Hilton investigation. Again it is compulsive in its detail and yet it feels reductive. Weirdly, it eschews almost all mention of Abhiik Kumar, and focuses exclusively on the activities of Anderson, Alister and Dunn. One can sense the investigative narrative growing a new skin in which the Australasian spiritual leader is expunged from the record.

  The résumé seems to finish, if not on a note of defeat, then certainly on a desire to pass on the now completely inert case to someone else. Points 42 and 43 in particular read as if they are addressed to cops from the future who might stumble accidentally upon the investigation after all the contemporary players are done and dusted:

  42. The original copy of the running sheet and the index of the Hilton bomb inquiry are held at the Homicide Squad, Criminal Investigation Branch. All photographs and television films of the two demonstrations and of members of the Ananda Marga sect are held at Special Branch Office, Police Headquarters.

  43. No date has yet been set for the hearing of the Inquest into the deaths of William Arthur FAVELL, Alex Raymond CARTER and Paul BIRMISTRIW [sic].16

  Then out of nowhere a miracle occurs.

  The locker and the gelignite

  The discovery of the bomb kit in a university locker in April 1981 jolts the investigation back to life. As Mrs Patricia Elson, a clerk at the University of New South Wales Union goes about her orderly, if overdue, task of checking the contents and bags retrieved from the male lockers that had not been renewed on Tuesday 28 April 1981 between 2.45 and 3 pm,1 let’s rewind to when there were rumours circulating of gelignite being stored by the Ananda Marga in a university locker in 1978 and 1979.

  The source of the information is one of the ASIO agents embedded within the Ananda Marga.

  In 1978 and 1979, ASIO received agent information that … some explosives left over from the Hilton had been stored in a locker at Macquarie University, in Sydney.2

  This was of sufficient merit to be passed on to the New South Wales police from ASIO, and in turn sparked a thorough, if ultimately fruitless, search of all the lockers at Macquarie University.3

  Now, almost two years later, an unsuspecting Patricia Elson at the University of New South Wales is unzipping a black overnight bag ‘in order to establish its ownership’. She has already examined a number of other abandoned bags, containing clothing and ‘other student type stuff’. In this particular one she sees some oblong-shaped cards on top and underneath them an oily rag. She lifts this nasty thing up only to then encounter a ‘dirty towel’. On lifting this away ‘I saw sticks of gelignite taped together … I knew the thing I saw in the bag was gelignite because it had the word gelignite on it.’4

  Mrs Elson does not panic. She informs her superiors, who confirm the finding, evacuate the building and call the police. The discovery must seem like a kind of gift from a higher being to the New South Wales police, who you’d imagine had given up all hope that any new evidence about the Hilton would spring up. Yet there it is:

  Six copper coloured detonators with yellow wire leads, three silver coloured metal detonators, a yellow towel, an orange table cloth, a plastic bag with the words ‘Tandy Electronics’ printed on it, two sets of battery terminals, two nine volt batteries which were taped together, three battery terminal leads, a roll of yellow fuse wires, a length of grey plastic covered wire, a roll of red plastic wire, a black and green clock arm, a metal breaker switch, a packet of metal contacts, a glass cutter with a blue and red coloured handle, a tube of metallic cement, a plastic ruler, two pairs of white woollen gloves, two University cards, an electoral card, an electoral roll card, a Sydney Technical College Card and an extract of a Birth Certificate on a plastic container.5

  Each of these items will be scrutinised obsessively but it is the ‘52 sticks of AN gelignite [and the] copy of the Sydney Morning Herald, dated Saturday 11th February, 1978’, which the first Detective Senior Serge
ant on the scene notes ‘was two days prior to the Hilton bombing’, that provide all the thrills.6

  Yet they are thrills designed to break hearts. The yield, or ‘cache’ as it will be referred to, promises many things and it appears at first to be the critical catalyst to reignite, if not solve, the virtually defunct Hilton investigation. But it will not deliver.

  You certainly can’t fault any of the police involved in the handling of the discovery, nor the subsequent investigation of the contents of the black vinyl bag. From meticulous witness statements, to photographs, to extensive reports on how items from the bag are transported and delivered for testing, no t’s are left uncrossed, no i’s undotted. The police seem to want to keep things calm and quiet and to go about matters in an orderly fashion — in short, to do things absolutely by the book so they hold up in court. Basically to do things completely differently from the police efforts in connection with Yagoona.

  Despite all this care, the contents of the bag, with its apparent surface sheen of juicy evidentiary value, will yield up less and less the more closely it is examined. It seems impossible that you could unearth a more direct piece of evidence in an unsolved crime, like the murder weapon, for example, that turns out to be so utterly useless. For a start, there are no fingerprints on anything. Next, all the identification in the bag turns out not to be from some dimwit Margii who left their ID with the gelignite, but to have been stolen from a University of New South Wales student the year before — she had been attending (as it is referred to in the police report) a ‘gay dance’ at the Roundhouse when her bag was nicked.7