Who bombed the Hilton? (35 page)

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:

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:

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:

*

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

In Western countries ‘non-violence' — the usual translation of the Sanskrit term
ahimsa
— is usually represented as the core value of Indian civilisation. As Voix explains, this is inextricably tied up with Gandhi and the Indian fight for independence. Since that point in India, ‘violence and non-violence are seen as mutually exclusive poles. However, in Hindu India, concepts of violence and non-violence are much more complex.' Voix then charges into a forensic linguistic analysis of the term and reveals that in fact
ahimsa
means ‘the absence of any desire to kill'. Following this definition, it is the context and the author of the act, rather than the act itself, that determines it as ‘violent' or ‘non-violent'.

Crovetto opens her paper with a quote from Sarkar himself: ‘Like materialism, spirituality based on non-violence will be of no benefit to humanity. The
words of non-violence may sound noble, and quite appealing, but on the solid ground of reality have no value whatsoever.'
⁵
Crovetto's and Voix's primary source material relies on oral accounts from sect members and ex-members that often conflict with the sect's official written versions.

Voix observes a clear: