Who bombed the Hilton?
Page 24
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’.7
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’.8
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.9
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.’10
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’.11 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.13 The test methodologies involve, to name a few, a nanospectrometer (colour), a pyrolysis mass spectrometer, high performance liquid chromatography and microscopy neutron activation analysis.14 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.15 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.
3.1 Blue Tape : The results show that the same type of blue tape occurred at both the Police Headquarters and the Yagoona scenes. However this is common insulation tape and there were no features on it that would make the pieces examined unusual.
3.2 Masking Tape : The examination showed clearly that the masking tape from the University of New South Wales and that from Yagoona was different and therefore could not have come from the same roll.
3.3. Electrical Wire (i) Detonator Wire. The yellow insulation on the detonator wire from all four scenes was the same colour and type … However such wire is made in large quantities and the type of wire from the four scenes is likely to be fairly common. No features were found on the detonator wires that would make them unusual 16 … (iii) the red wires from Yagoona and the Indian high Commission were clearly different …17
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:
Since there were no highly characteristic features to any of the items of similarity between the scenes and since there were many clear differences between other items from the various scenes, no support can be given to the possibility of there being a common point of manufacture for the four bombs. From the results obtained in this report it is not possible to exclude the possibility that the bombs were manufactured independently of each other.18
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’,19 ‘could have a common origin but the possibility of different sources cannot be excluded’,20 ‘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’.21
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.’22 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:
The Yellow PVC insulated, single strand wire from the cache at the University of New South Wales, the Indian High Commission device, and the unit found at Yagoona, all exhibited the same trace elements [of Antimony, Arsenic, Cobalt, Gold, Iron, Mercury, Scandium, Selenium, Silver, and Zinc] in the same trace concentration.
Goulding concludes: ‘experience has shown that these comparable trace element profiles can only occur when the samples had a common origin, i.e. the same ingot of refined copper’.23
It’s something but it’s not a whole lot. There are some similarities — the strongest being the matching printing fault on the gelignite wrappers from Yagoona and the cache from the University of New South Wales, but there is little information provided on how big a batch of gelignite
may have been affected by this manufacturing error. As Dr Hall himself admits after much of the testing has finished:
From an evidentiary point of view, I would suggest that any lay person looking at the table would find some similarities that they might find significant, but at the same time there are some evident dissimilarities.24
It’s hard to fathom how such comme ci comme ca results can transform into a kind of code breaking machine over the next decade. It’s clear from the above that the comparisons are slight at best and even if some of the bombs can be tied together there is nothing tying the New South Wales Uni cache to the Hilton and, more importantly, nothing tying any individual to these bombs. Yet somehow the imagined value of these results grows as the years roll by. In 1993, Dr Hall himself approaches Roger Holdich, the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, and tells him explicitly that testing had thrown up ‘significant similarities between the caches of explosives’ and that in spite of this, the Wood Section 475 inquiry in 1984–85 had not sought to present this evidence in its findings. Holdich tries to get to the bottom of this assertion by interviewing Mark Tedeschi QC, who had been the crown prosecutor at Tim Anderson’s trial in 1989. Dr Hall had also taken Tedeschi through the ‘significant similarities’, although a decision had been made not to present this evidence at Anderson’s trial. Tedeschi’s belief is that if the 1984–85 Section 475 inquiry (as to the guilt or innocence of the Yagoona Three) had used ‘this material’, it ‘could very well have affected the outcome of the inquiry’.25
The truth is the original test results were not that strong in an evidentiary sense. All these statements suggesting that if only the results had been looked at closely by ‘the proper authorities/at the inquiry/at the trial’ they would have swayed the course of history do not seem to be correct.
So there you have it. The last red-hot go at getting to Abhiik comes to nothing.
So where does that leave us? Once the mayhem of the respective Pederick and Anderson trials ends with Anderson’s successful appeal and Pederick’s release, there’s not a whole lot more that can be said. Kumar’s appearances, like that of an ageing movie star, become rarer and rarer.
Sometimes I wonder if Norm Sheather, as he approached the end of his career and entered retirement, paid any attention to these infrequent turns of Abhiik Kumar on the public stage. Perhaps.
1989 and after
One thing I am pretty sure that Norm would have noticed is the fracas surrounding the abrupt arrest of Tim Anderson as the Hilton bomber in 1989 based on the accusations of convicted criminal Ray Denning. As mentioned earlier, what makes these slippery allegations stick is ex-Margii Evan Pederick’s confession that he planted the bomb under orders from Anderson. While this confession, the subsequent police investigation and the prosecution case are riddled with inconsistencies, incoherencies and gigantic cock-ups, there remain a few things to clear up.
First, given the embarrassing revelations during the investigation and then at the trial that Pederick frequently got the basic facts completely wrong in his highly detailed account of attempting to blow up Desai with a remote control device as he was greeted by Fraser outside the Hilton, there are nevertheless things in his confession that are bizarrely and inexplicably accurate. Things that might explain why, while the Queensland police who dealt with him first didn’t take him seriously, the New South Wales police got so hot and bothered. Things it’s hard to explain.
Pederick originally said he dumped the leftover gelignite from the Hilton in a locker at Macquarie University. While this is helpfully adjusted to become a locker at the University of New South Wales by the New South Wales police interviewing him in 1989 who ‘jog’ his memory — this in fact is the exact location that ASIO said they heard rumours about in 1978–79. Likewise his blather about using a remote control device that malfunctioned lines up beautifully with the 1982 ASIO intelligence that has Abhiik Kumar complaining about such devices. None of these things was in the public domain.
But the fact remains that most of what Pederick confessed (in obsessive detail) was proved to be inaccurate. The police and prosecution at the time made much of the lengthy passage of time between the bombing and the confession to explain such inconsistencies, but it wasn’t really such a huge chunk of time, was it? Pederick said he was motivated to confess because of overwhelming guilt. You’d imagine, with that sort of blood on your hands, the events and your actions would still be seared indelibly in your brain a little over a decade afterwards.
Don’t get me wrong. I can’t comprehend how the case got to trial at all given the insanely shifting versions of who did what to whom, or how a jury found Anderson guilty on this slipshod mound of ‘evidence’. It was a mess from start to finish. I do understand how Anderson won the appeal and I believe justice prevailed.
However, I also think that Pederick’s confession differs from that of the mentally ill individuals who put up their hands for the crime during Sheather’s tenure on the Hilton task force. Unlike those distracting confessions, full of madness and self-loathing, Pederick’s confession has the hallmarks of someone who had access to inside information. Whether this ‘information’ was just wild gossip he had heard or whether some of it was true, it feels like a story borrowed second-hand from someone else. Like a Chinese whisper passed down the line.
The other thing that strikes you when you read Pederick’s confession — something that was lost in the noise of outrage during Anderson’s trial — was that he also named Abhiik Kumar as the mastermind behind the bomb.
Make of that what you will.
What is so peculiar about the saga of the Hilton bombing is that it produced two such spectacularly bizarre characters — Seary and Pederick — unknown to each other but of such astoundingly similar oddness and, let’s face it, unreliability. The public finds each of them utterly unfathomable during their respective appearances (separated by over a decade) in the case. People seem unable to make head nor tail of what might be motivating them. Yet in the end each of them did display a certain consistency.
Seary maintained that while he was wrong about many things, particularly in relation to the supposed confessions about the Hilton bombing he claimed to have heard, what he reported to Special Branch about the Ananda Marga up to 15 June was the truth. In 1985 Seary told the media he was ‘not a hundred per cent certain that Alister and Dunn did what they said they did … I’m a hundred per cent certain now that the Ananda Marga personnel and associates quite probably arranged and did the Hilton bombing’.1 In Pederick’s case, despite his attempt to appeal his sentence on the basis of Anderson’s successful appeal discrediting his evidence, he has continued to assert that he planted the Hilton bomb.
The other thing that connects Seary and Pederick is an extraordinary document published in 1994 by the Office of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security. This report, titled Complaint by Mr Richard John Seary against the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation: Final Report is ASIO’s first (and final public) paper on the Ananda Marga and the Hilton bombing. Authored by Roger Holdich, the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, it is, in essence, a highly detailed response to Richard Seary’s accusations that ASIO had failed to produce evidence from its covert operatives within the sect that would have validated many of his allegations regarding the Ananda Marga. However, the report goes much further than simply rebutting Seary’s complaints and offers some probing analysis about the case itself.
For example, at one point Holdich observes:
It is interesting to note the differences between the accounts of Seary and Pederick. Whereas Seary implicated Alister, Dunn and Anderson in the bombing (with Anderson being a peripheral figure), Pederick has never formally accused Alister or Dunn. On the other hand, both Seary and Pederick have claimed in recent times that a sect member, ‘Abhiik’, was a catalyst for the bombing.2
So did Abhiik Kumar mastermind the Hilton bombing? Was this man of so many names and passports the one behind it
after all? His proximity to so many international acts of violence involving Margii or Proutist foot soldiers swirling around Baba’s failed appeals in the late 1970s seems to suggest a compelling circumstantial case. He had the means and motive.
Holdich’s report is confident about making this assertion:
[The bombing] is consistent with other Ananda Marga attacks on Indian officials during the period and there are grounds for strongly suspecting Ananda Marga responsibility. ASIO information does not support the case against Alister and Dunn, and the information on Anderson is both conflicting and inconclusive. Source information and circumstantial evidence suggests that ‘Ainjali’ [a woman], ‘Suvod’, ‘Kapil’ and ‘Dhruva’ were directed by ‘Abhiik’ to undertake the Hilton bombing. There currently appears [to be] insufficient evidence to initiate prosecutions.3
*
It is edifying to discover some contemporary, untainted analysis about the Margiis that sees the interconnection between segments of the sect and acts of violence in the 1970s as overt. These two sources, one from a French anthropologist and one from an American religious scholar, were both published in 2008 in the esteemed journal Novia Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions. Both articles scrupulously research through distinct methodology the role of violence in the history and functioning of Ananda Marga. It is important to note that both authors, if not somewhat sympathetic to the sect, are certainly far from hostile. Raphaël Voix’s paper is titled ‘Denied Violence, Glorified Fighting: Spiritual Discipline and Controversy in Ananda Marga’, and Helen Crovetto’s ‘Ananda Marga and the Use of Force’. Both authors take it as a given that violence was an intrinsic element in the hierarchy of the sect and back their claims with substantial evidence and rigour.4