Who bombed the Hilton? Read online

  But this is all to come. By the end of February things start to open up to Norm, and what starts to flow in becomes a strong river of material pointing in the direction of the Margiis.

  February to March 1978

  To Norm’s credit, despite the emergence of a strong suspect organisation, he continues not to place all his investigative eggs in the Ananda Marga basket. He keeps a robust number of officers exploring other leads. From late February to early March the Hilton task force investigates and discards dozens of names from the list of possible suspects.

  For example, it is found to be unlikely that the bombing was undertaken by a militant Fijian trade unionist.1 Likewise, while the three Singaporean students under suspicion (other than the student Ngee questioned and cleared immediately after the bombing) are found to be ‘anti-Malaysia/Singapore government in outlook’, it is acknowledged that ‘this does not necessarily mean that any of these persons have been involved in any terrorist type of activity, or are in fact connected with any overseas group’.2 A perky telex arrives from the Tongans in response to Norm Sheather’s international call-out on 14 February requesting information about known terrorists who may fit the modus operandi involved in the Hilton bombing:

  REPLY FROM TONGA STATES NO TONGANS OVERSEAS WITH ANY DECLARED ANIMOSITY TO KING OR ROYAL FAMILY STOP NO TONGAN POLITICAL MOTIVE SUSPECTED END STOP.3

  One of the suspect Croatians is found to have a solid alibi (he was in bed in Melbourne) and crossed off.4 There is one mentally ill gentleman who confesses to being the bomber5 and then another who sends a letter to Prime Minister Fraser, the Commissioner of the Commonwealth Police and the Attorney-General of Queensland:

  Statutory Declaration

  Subject

  Planting of militant Racist, Political and Industrial Terrorists as ‘so called’ union officials. Planting of timebomb in garbage tin at Hilton Hotel Sydney, mailing of planted Explosives in parcels and envelopes in Australian mail and Planting of Militant Racist, Political and Industrial terrorists as so called combined mining and miners Federation Union officials by Utah Development Company’s Gestapo Officials ‘so called’ Industrial advisors … it is a premeditated crime against innocent people, against Australia as Nation.

  And so it continues. Despite the florid accusations, Mr VS is nonetheless added to the list of people to be interviewed by the task force who, unsurprisingly, find ‘that it is obvious that S … is mentally deficient’ and then he too gets crossed off.6

  Along with the crazies there are also the homegrown xenophobes to contend with. As mentioned, Mrs A sends a long paranoid diatribe about a number of Indians in her street who she says are responsible for the terrorist act as evidenced by a leaflet she found in her letterbox.7 A journalist from The Age newspaper calls from Port Moresby and relates an intensely complicated tale about a German prisoner who suicided in a PNG jail, the prisoner’s wife and his criminal associate. The dead prisoner is alleged to have been a former member of the Baader-Meinhof gang and rumours spread in Port Moresby that he was the one responsible for the bombing.8 A chap living in Indonesia shoots off a letter to the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, ‘to inform you about the gang of terrorists which is responsible for bomb explosions at the Hilton Hotel’. This eclectic gang is made up of a Polynesian communist, a Japanese–Australian citizen who is a shipping expert, and a Malaysian journalist. The informant signs off cheerily, ‘Hoping the Commonwealth conference will bring stability in South-East Asia and blessed by God.’ 9 All these claims are looked into and dismissed.

  The police are also methodically working to locate all the various protesters who were outside the Hilton on the day prior to the bombing. On 24 February one of the banner-wielding protesters is hauled in. He’s cautioned and questioned. He is eagerly helpful, insisting that Detective Senior Constable Harvey, who is typing up his statement, add emphasis to his statement for effect: ‘I was carrying a sign called “politicians are the pus” (please underline that — done) “of a suppurating society”.’ He goes on to add dramatically that he shoved his ‘large and heavy’ sign into the bin around 2.30 pm. ‘It went in fairly easily with two heavy thrusts, right to the bottom. I am giving you this information because the Police want to know if there was a possibility of the bomb being there before.’10

  The owner of the suspicious 1964 Mr Whippy ice-cream van sighted the night of the bombing is eventually tracked down. After weeks of media reporting, a teenage boy from Ashfield Boys High School sheepishly approaches the police and reveals the van is the property of his father, Angelo Parente, who speaks very little English. The van had broken down near the bomb site.11

  In early March there is a flurry of excitement when the Hilton task force reveals a new lead. Because of the strength of the lead, and possibly the fact that all the recent international acts of violence have involved female suspects, the police decide to immediately alert the media and the public: ‘Police investigating the Hilton bombing believe that a young woman seen carrying a small cardboard box near the hotel could help with their investigations.’ The team go so far as to set up a full re-enactment outside the hotel ‘of the dumping of the box into a kerbside garbage bin’. It’s a good theory — this woman was seen by a dozen witnesses between 1.30 pm and 2.30 pm carrying a box. Norm is already thinking his bomber could be female. The ‘suppurating pus’ sign wielder is brought back in and he now swears that when he was doing his heavy thrusting with the sign that he ‘struck a brown cardboard box at the bottom’.12

  Despite the vagaries of the woman’s description in the papers, she is identified straightaway. It turns out that she is 22-year-old ‘Penny’, a New Zealand resident who had flown to Sydney with the explicit intention of protesting at CHOGRM. She is described in the papers as ‘a New Zealand woman known to be violently opposed to the abortion policies of the New Zealand government … they believe [her presence in Sydney] could be linked with a pro-abortion demonstration against Mr Muldoon outside the Hilton Hotel on the Sunday before the bombing’. Some nark of a bloke she met the night she arrived rushes to the police to report that ‘the woman was very hostile toward Mr Muldoon [whose] … attitude towards abortion had caused misery to many women’.13

  It’s all over the next day when Penny, who is clearly not a shy girl, fronts up at the Wellington police station in New Zealand and demands to see the police. Within hours she is cleared of any involvement in the Hilton Hotel bombing.14

  There’s even a psychic who throws in his ten cents, holding a press conference at the airport. Mr Amery:

  … claimed that he was a professional Mystic with certain psychic powers. He claimed that on Sunday 12.2.78 he and his wife had a premonition that Prime Minister MULDOON would be in danger at the Hilton Hotel. AMERY claims that both he and his wife were both in Queensland on 12.2.78 and that he actually telephoned the Hilton to warn Mr Muldoon, but nobody would put him through … Amery stated that he had no information about the bombing which could assist police, and that in fact his premonition was not that a bomb was at the Hilton, but the [sic] Prime Minister Muldoon was in some form of danger.

  Perhaps what Mr Amery had detected was Penny’s intense loathing for Piggy Muldoon and his antiabortion stance. Or more likely, as the police and ‘the members of the press who attended the interview’ decide, ‘AMERY was a bit of a nut case’.15

  As all this trawling for, and clearing of, suspects grinds on, consuming wads of the task force’s time, a thing of wonder is happening behind the scenes. Responses to the original telex that Sheather sent out to the police of the world asking for information on groups capable of similar acts of violence begin to roll in. One of the first comes from the French police, who send a sort of Baader-Meinhof showbag to Sheather consisting of wanted posters, a list of 90 known members and a booklet relating the history and crimes of the group in Europe.16

  With this one exception, all the other responses from the international police departments are extraordinary in their consistency and indeed their br
eadth and detail. Keep in mind the original telex Norm sent seeking information did not speculate or offer possible theories or suspects. It simply asked: What do you know? Is there something this bombing at the Hilton reminds you of?

  Over the next fortnight Norm Sheather’s task force is sent telexes from police in the following countries: the UK, Afghanistan, India, Sweden, Thailand, Denmark, the USA, Norway, Germany and Canada. Each and every one of them independently identifies members of the Ananda Marga being caught or being suspects in a series of violent attacks or threats directed towards Indian nationals in their respective countries. Each also indicates that the bombing outside the Hilton bears certain similarities to the sect’s violent operations in their own dominions.

  The Metropolitan Police (the Met) in London send information regarding the attempted embassy bombing and attempted murder of the Indian ambassador in late 1977 by Margii members Kidd, Waring and Shaw. Norm and the task force already know about this case, but the Met expands on what they have, forwarding the fingerprints of the three, and adding more names to the list of suspects. There is the US-born Catalina Rivera Cabanatan, who is alleged to have been involved in the UK attack. The English police state that Cabanatan is a known associate of US-born Margii Stephen Holman, who Anthony Niall Kidd has fingered as the mastermind behind the London plot. Both Holman (the middle name of Abhiik Kumar’s alias Jason Holman Alexander) and Cabanatan are known to have ties to US Margii Sarah Child, who was arrested in Thailand with the Australians Spark and Jones on 15 February. The British forward the passport applications of both, presumably obtained from the US authorities. Even in these plain orderly forms there is a sense of the nature of these young fundamentalists, as there was in the case of Australian Timothy Jones, who now sits in a Bangkok jail. I can tell you that both Stephen Holman and Catalina Cabanatan have beautiful cursive handwriting, that neither had been in their home country for years, and both had parents who were doctors — in Stephen’s case it is Burton, his father, and in Catalina’s, her mother Aurora.17

  The information from the Afghanistan police relates to a threatening letter sent to the Indian ambassador in Kabul. This letter, postmarked Kabul, is actually sent as part of the first wave of threats and violence against Indian nationals in late 1977, but is only forwarded to the Australian police as part of this post–Hilton bombing request. The letter itself is reminiscent of the threatening letters written in the name of UPRF, except this one is exquisitely presented — it’s a piece of calligraphy and laid out like a poem. The letter intones:

  You and three members

  of your embassy

  are marked for assassination

  one suicide squad is now leaving Nepal

  and will be there when you receive this

  Remember Canberra!

  We will not stop until

  Anandamurti is

  released by your

  government.18

  It must boggle the minds of Norm Sheather and his colleagues that someone in Kabul would make reference to an attempted kidnapping in Canberra by Australian Margii John Duff. It really is as if Australia is the centre of this international terrorist storm.

  As if to reinforce this, telexes and telegrams arrive within days of each other from the police in Stockholm, Denmark and Los Angeles, all providing considerable detail about attacks on Indian nationals, Air India offices or Indian embassies that were carried out in their cities (and others) late the previous year. What is new to the Hilton task force is the level of detail these various police organisations provide about the crimes being perpetrated. What’s clear, too, is the frustration these police forces are feeling. They have strong suspicions that the Ananda Marga members in their countries are responsible: ‘Evidence connecting the Ananda Marga with the incident was found … A member … Swami Dhritbodhananda was observed in the vicinity the night before the incident.’19However, they often lack concrete evidence and the sect representatives in each country vehemently deny any involvement in acts of violence.

  All of these international authorities, like their Australian counterparts, have been bombarded with letters from the UPRF claiming or threatening acts of violence. The letters are accompanied by public denials from the Swedish, Danish and American sect members, asserting that they didn’t do whatever the letters threaten and that they have no connection to UPRF.

  The other new intelligence that the Hilton task force receives provides a sense of the violent physical attacks that do occur.

  On 11.11.77 at 11.40 hrs a female oriental or Filipino, blk hair, brn eyes. 5’ 2”, 100 lbs., 22/25, entered the Los Angeles Air India Office and requested information on a trip to India. When employee Sudesh Mallick turned his back the female lunged at him with a military type knife with a 4-inch blade. The suspect dropped the knife and fled the building on foot.20

  The LA police go on to report that similar attacks have occurred in New York City (20/10/77) and Washington DC (28/11/77). They also reiterate what the task force already knows: that one of their citizens has been arrested with two Australians in Thailand ‘in possession of 1300 grams of C4 explosives, detonators and timing devices. Also in their possession was a Bangkok map with the United States and Australian chancelleries circled’.21 The feeling emerging from all this information sharing is ‘we’re part of this too, the Margiis are good for these crimes’.

  Particularly convinced are the police from Interpol in the Philippines, who have the two Margiis in custody over the stabbing in Manila on 7 February 1978. In their reply to Norm they write:

  We confirm attack of Jyoti Sarup Vaid, 45 years old Indian working with the Indian embassy in Manila as personnel secretary charge d’affairs at about 7.30 am … he was stabbed on the back and chest by two American tourists. One male, identified as Steven Michael Dwyer [Stephen Dyer], 28 years old, single, a teacher, and the other a female identified as Victoria Sheppard [Shepherd], 31 years old, single, also a teacher: while they refused to confess, they were nonetheless charged for frustrated murder on the basis of positive identification made by the victim and witness. Assailants are said to be members of the Ananda Marga, an organisation allegedly engaged in assassination of respectable Indians abroad.22

  They too are eager to help and send Norm’s team fingerprints, photographs and police reports relating to the attack.

  The tone that emerges from this cluster of responses is real concern about what could happen next. The whole thing has police around the world on edge. The Swedes have a Margii conference in Stockholm later that year and they are clearly nervous.

  What must really get Norm’s blood up, however, is some extraordinary intelligence he receives on 9 March 1978, which lassoes these far-flung events and people and pulls them inextricably together. The information is received from ‘a reliable and confidential source relative to the inquiry concerning the Ananda Marga sect’. It’s probable (but difficult to tell from the police running sheets) that the information comes through Interpol, possibly via ASIO, is passed on to Special Branch and thence to the Hilton task force.

  The intelligence places key Ananda Marga members associated with these hitherto discrete violent acts in Bangkok, Manila and (potentially) Australia all together in India with the imprisoned Sarkar immediately prior to the denial of his appeal and the start of the second wave of violence.

  It states:

  This information indicates that between the 7th and 10th January, 1978 several leading Ananda Marga members passed through Bangkok en route to Kathmandu. Included amongst these were Timothy Hilton Jones (stationed in South Korea) [arrested in Thailand 15 February] Victoria Mary Sheppard [Shepherd] (probably stationed in the Philippines) [arrested in Manila 7 February] and Jason Holman Alexander (the spiritual director of Ananda Marga in Australia) [aka Abhiik Kumar].23

  Just to be absolutely clear, Kumar spent January travelling with Shepherd and Jones, both of whom are now in jail — one for an act of violence in Manila, one for possessing explosives in Thailand — immediately
after the trio met with Sarkar in India.

  Between 30th January and 7th February 1978 Jones, Sheppard [Shepherd], Alexander and two senior Ananda Marga Members from the United States Caroline Lee Spark and Sarah Childs [sic; also arrested in Thailand on 15 February] returned to Bangkok from Katmandu.24

  To be even clearer, the Thai police have intelligence that places Kumar alongside Jones, Child and Spark in the purchase of the C4 explosives in the days prior to their arrest.

  During the period 10th to 30th January, 1978 Spark, Alexander [Kumar] and Jones all had interviews with the Ananda Marga leader PR Sarkar, who is in gaol in Patna India and that at least Alexander and Jones spent some time together. It is therefore possible that a meeting or briefing of senior Ananda Marga leaders was held in India some time between 10th and 30th January, 1978.

  On the 2nd February, 1978, an appeal by Sarkar was rejected, and it is thought that a series of violent or potentially violent incidents by Ananda Marga members throughout the world may begin.25, 26