Who bombed the Hilton? (32 page)

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'.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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:

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.
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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].
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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,
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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.

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.
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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.'
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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:

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 Sergeant on the scene notes ‘was two days prior to the Hilton bombing', that provide all the thrills.
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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.
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Next thing to cross off the list of possible excitements is the identity of who hired the locker in the first
place. The University of New South Wales turns out to be much better at attention to detail than Special Branch, and they are able to produce the original receipt of the man who hired the locker on 11 July 1978. While this becomes the source of all manner of wild theories over the next decade, examining the police evidence it's hard to comprehend what all the fuss is about. The receipt for $6 is signed by an MJ Melton. The $6 indicates it's a new hire and not a renewal. A person can only hire a locker if they have a student card. While there were no New South Wales students known as MJ Melton there was one called JJ Melton — MJ are the initials of his father. Naturally enough the police hurry off to interview this young man.

John Jeffrey Melton is revealed to be a serving midshipman aboard HMAS
Melbourne
, which is stationed in Perth. Police are sent to Perth to interview him and it turns out that while he is indeed registered at the University of New South Wales, it is only through an associate course taken through the Royal Australian Naval College at Jervis Bay, 193 kilometres from the University of New South Wales Roundhouse where the discovery was made. He tells them he has never been to the University of New South Wales personally and that he never leased a locker.