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| Sydney Hilton Hotel bombing | |
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The scene shortly after the bombing
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| Location | Hilton Hotel, George Street, Sydney, Australia |
| Coordinates | 33°52′19″S 151°12′26″E / 33.87194°S 151.20722°E / -33.87194; 151.20722 |
| Date | 13 February 1978 (1978-02-13) 12:40 am (UTC+11) |
Attack type | Bomb |
| Deaths | 3 |
| Injured | 11 |
| Perpetrators | Evan Pederick was tried, convicted and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment |
The Sydney Hilton Hotel bombing occurred on 13 February 1978, when a bomb exploded outside the Hilton HotelinGeorge Street, Sydney, Australia. At the time the hotel was hosting the first Commonwealth Heads of Government Regional Meeting (CHOGRM), a regional offshoot of the biennial meetings of the heads of government from across the Commonwealth of Nations.
The bomb was planted in a rubbish bin and exploded when the bin was emptied into a garbage truck outside the hotel at 12:40 a.m. It killed two men, Alec Carter and William Favell, the garbage collectors who picked up the bin. A police officer guarding the entrance to the hotel lounge, Paul Burmistriw, died later. It also injured eleven others. Twelve foreign leaders were staying in the hotel at the time, but none were injured. Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser immediately called out the Australian Army for the remainder of the CHOGRM meeting.[1]
The Hilton case has been highly controversial due to allegations that Australian security forces, such as the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), may have been responsible. This led to the Parliament of New South Wales unanimously calling for the Commonwealth to hold an inquiry in 1991 and 1995.[2][3]
The Hilton bombing was described in Parliament as the first and only domestic terrorist event in Australia.[2]
Prior to the bombing the security forces had been under considerable pressure. In South Australia, the White inquiry into their police special branch was very critical, and ties with ASIO were cut.[2] New South Wales was about to have a similar inquiry. After the bombing, the NSW inquiry was never held, and the Commonwealth increased support for the anti-terrorism activities of the intelligence services.[4]
It has been asserted that there were a number of unusual circumstances, namely:
Many of these issues were identified by Terry Griffiths, a former policeman who was seriously injured in the bombing, who had called for an inquiry.[2] Peter Collins, NSW Attorney General 1991–1992, said "The Hilton Bombing is a history of half truths, a litany of lies".[4] Barry Hall QC, counsel for Griffiths, argued that ASIO may well have planted the bomb in order to justify their existence.[4]
The 1982 Walsh inquest had been terminated prematurely due to the finding of a prima facie case of murder.[6]
The then Indian prime minister Morarji Desai claimed that Ananda Marga had attempted to kill him due to the imprisonment of the organisation's spiritual leader, Shrii Shrii Anandamurti. (There had been other alleged attacks by Ananda Marga, namely on 15 September 1977 the military attaché at the Indian High Commission, Canberra, Colonel Singh and his wife, were attacked in Canberra. Just over a month later an Air India employee in Melbourne was stabbed.)[9] ASIO had infiltrated the Ananda Marga from 1976 and were monitoring it.[10]
In 1998, Ben Hills wrote an article called "The Hilton Fiasco", published in the Sydney Morning Herald. He argued that members of Ananda Marga were responsible for the Hilton bombing, saying that Evan Pederick was recruited for the bombing by Tim Anderson, while a man called Abhiik Kumar was the likely mastermind. He also asserted that ASIO had information which would have helped in the police investigation, but withheld it.[10]
InWho Bombed the Hilton? (2016), film-maker Rachel Landers addressed the accusation that the bins outside the Hilton were left unemptied, with a bomb secreted inside one of them, as part of a conspiracy by Australian police or security agencies. Landers asserts: "An enormous number of people are free to shove any number of objects (including an enormous placard) into the bin, lean on it or use it as a convenient seat over a very long period of time. For the conspiracists to be correct, the following have to be lying in their statements: seven garbage men (including a street sweeper), an accountant, two hippies, a sign-writer, a father of two out for the day with his kids, an anarchist and the Hilton commissionaire. They also have to be colluding with each other, the police who have been told to wave away garbage trucks and, one assumes, ASIO and their mates at Special Branch." Landers also draws attention to the activities of Abhiik Kumar. She maintains that Kumar had been in almost every country where there was a threat, an attack or cases of Margis being arrested for violence against an Indian national. This included Kumar being in Sydney the day before the Hilton bombing.[11]
InThe Hilton Bombing: Evan Pederick and the Ananda Marga (2019), Imre Salusinszky argued that "not a single shred of evidence has emerged to support any of the conspiracy theories about the Hilton bombing." He said "the official cover-up, if indeed there is one, has remained tight as a drum".[12]: 292, 303 Salusinszky gives a detailed account of Pederick's involvement in AM activities. This included planting the bomb outside the Hilton and then going to Brisbane on the same day. He also covers in detail Pederick's decision to confess to a Catholic priest after eleven years of guilt and torment.[12]: 8, 196–203
A few days after the bombing, Richard Seary offered his services to the police Special Branch as an informant. He expressed the view that the Ananda Marga society might be involved with the Hilton bombing; he soon infiltrated that organization, which had its headquarters in three adjacent houses in Queen Street, Newtown.[13]: 70
On 15 June, Seary told Special Branch that members of Ananda Marga intended to bomb the home of Robert Cameron, a member of the far-right National Front of Australia, that night at his home in the Sydney suburb of Yagoona. Two members of the society — Ross Dunn and Paul Alister — were subsequently apprehended at Yagoona in Seary's company and charged with conspiracy to murder Robert Cameron.[4]
It was alleged that Dunn and Alister had intended to plant a bomb at Cameron's home. Dunn and Alister stated that they intended only to write graffiti at Cameron's home and had no knowledge of the bomb, which they claimed had been brought by Seary. Seary having already given discredited evidence accusing Dunn and Alister at the initial Hilton bombing inquest, was considered an unreliable witness in the written judgement of the High Court in Alister v R (1984):[14]
...Richard Seary, drug addict, informer and mentally disturbed fantasizer, must be one of the most unreliable persons ever presented as the principal prosecution witness on a charge of serious crime. The accused were entitled to refer to the fact that Seary had accused them of admitting the Hilton bombing. The accusation by Seary was made in circumstances which cast grave doubt upon his credibility. Seary claimed that Alister and Dunn made the admission to him in the car on the way to Cameron's house. However, in Seary's record of interview following the arrest at Yagoona, in which he set out the events, he made no reference to the Hilton bombing. If the admission had been made, Seary's failure to refer to it was extraordinary.
— Justice Murphy, Par 7, § "Improper Cross-Examination", Alister v R (1984)
However, there was also some police evidence, and the prosecution had strongly associated the matter with the Sydney Hilton bombing.[14] The trial relating to the alleged plot to bomb Cameron's home began in February 1979, but the jury could not come to a verdict. A second trial was held in July and all three defendants were convicted.[14][13]: 48
A coronial inquest into the bombing itself was eventually held in 1982.[4] Stipendiary Magistrate Walsh found a prima facie case of murder against two members of Ananda Marga—Ross Dunn and Paul Alister (but not Tim Anderson)—based on evidence from Richard Seary which was later discredited.[2]
Coronial inquiries are limited in their scope. No person appearing before the coroner has a right to subpoena evidence without permission from the coroner, and in this inquest Walsh rejected all applications.[15]
In 1984, the Attorney-General, Paul Landa, established an inquiry to investigate the convictions of Dunn, Alister and Anderson. The inquiry was similar to a Royal Commission, and was headed by Justice Wood. Richard Seary was in England at the time and did not take part, but after the inquiry indicated that he was willing to take part. Justice Wood reconvened the inquiry and it ran through to February 1985. The result was that Justice Wood recommended the pardoning of the three, and they were released in 1985.[4] (The inquiry did not directly cover the Hilton Bombing.) The pardoned trio received compensation from the NSW Government. Alister ploughed his compensation money into land on Bridge Creek Road near Maleny, Queensland, which would become his home, and also the site of the Ananda Marga River School.[16]
According to Paul Alister's later assertions, points that emerged during the inquiry included:[17]
Paul Alister later speculated about Richard Seary's motives, saying he was a "wild card" because he seemed to have his own agenda. He stated that Seary seemed to have a mixture of motives for what he said, and seemed to dislike the police. Seary's girlfriend indicated that Seary had been pressured by the police to find evidence that incriminated the "Margiis". Alister and his colleagues speculated that perhaps Seary was being blackmailed into informing because of his former activity as a drug addict. Seary had also been present when someone had died of a drug overdose; this may have given the police leverage over him because he could be charged.[17]
In 1989, Anderson was re-arrested for the Sydney Hilton bombing, tried, convicted and sentenced to fourteen years. The crown prosecutor was Mark Tedeschi QC. However Anderson was acquitted in 1991 by the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal,[2] which held that the verdicts of guilty were unsafe and unsatisfactory. Chief Justice Gleeson concluded:
... there was one important respect in which, in my view, the proceedings miscarried ... The Crown was permitted, in an unfair manner, to obscure a major difficulty concerning the reliability of the evidence of its principal witness ... by raising an hypothesis that was not reasonably open on the evidence ... a direction given by the learned trial judge to the jury relating to the "sanity" of Pederick ... constitutes an additional reason for treating the verdicts as unsafe and the process at the trial as unsatisfactory ... The trial of the appellant miscarried principally because of an error which resulted in large part from the failure of the prosecuting authorities adequately to check aspects of the Jayewardene theory. This was compounded by what I regard as an inappropriate and unfair attempt by the Crown to persuade the jury to draw inferences of fact, and accept argumentative suggestions, that were not properly open on the evidence. I do not consider that in those circumstances the Crown should be given a further opportunity to patch up its case against the appellant. It has already made one attempt too many to do that, and I believe that, if that attempt had never been made, there is a strong likelihood that the appellant would have been acquitted.
Instead of ordering a new trial, the Court entered a judgement of acquittal.[18][19][20]
Pederick had confessed to the bombing and so was convicted without detailed scrutiny of his confession. However, in the Anderson appeal, Chief Justice Gleeson said Pederick's account of the bombing was "clearly unreliable".[2] He found: "On any view of the matter, his account of the events of 12 February 1978, and in particular of the circumstances relating to his actual attempt at assassination, is clearly unreliable. He is incapable of giving a description of those events which does not involve serious error."[21] Questions about Pederick's sanity were raised in the Anderson appeal. Gleeson criticised the trial judge's directions to the jury that Pederick must be assumed to be "sane". He described Pederick as "a witness who said that on a particular occasion he stood in George Street in Sydney and tried to blow up the Prime Minister of India, the Prime Minister of Australia, and a number of other people besides, and, when his attempt was unsuccessful, attributed its failure to the supernatural intervention of his guru". The Chief Justice added: "He seems to have been a person whose reasoning processes were somewhat unorthodox. There was a significant danger of confusing the jurors by telling them that the law presumed him to be sane".[22]
Pederick did (unsuccessfully) appeal his own conviction in 1996, the year before his release.[23] The appeal was rejected when he produced no evidence to explain why his original confession had been false. Pederick was released after serving eight years in jail and stated: "I guess I was quite unique in the prison system in that I had to keep proving my guilt, whereas everyone else said they were innocent."[10]
The two failed prosecutions against Tim Anderson and his friends have been cited as instances of Australian miscarriages of justice, for example in Kerry Carrington's 1991 book Travesty! Miscarriages of Justice and in other law texts including notes on compensation practice.[24][25][26][27][28]
A plaque was unveiled at the site of the explosion in George Street on 13 February 2008, the 30th anniversary of the blast.
The then-Premier of New South Wales, Morris Iemma, commended the City of Sydney Council for restoring the memorial plaque to its original home, and said he hoped there will never be a need for another.[29]
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