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Hilton bombing

On 13 February 1978 at 1:40am a bomb exploded in a rubbish bin outside the Hilton Hotel in Sydney, Australia killing two garbagemen and a policeman, and injuring several others. The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting was taking place in the hotel and a number of foreign leaders were staying there.

Tim Anderson, Ross Dunn and Paul Alister , known as the Ananda Marga Three and members of the Ananda Marga sect, were jailed until 15 May 1985 for the bombing, before being pardoned after several inquiries.

However, there has been controversy about the motives of the bomb and the handling of the case that surrounded it. ASIO are said to have planted the bomb so it could be "found", in order to "justify its existence", as said by Barry Hall, part of counsel for Terry Griffiths, who claimed that the Hilton bombing was somehow a conspiracy. Later analysis of police interviews by the Special Branch, who were being threatened with closure due to widespread corruption at the time, of Anderson were revealed to have heavily used so-called "tag questions " which prompt a certain answer, plus the revelation of information that perhaps should not have been revealed in interviews.

Furthermore, the Indian prime minister, Morarji Desai claimed that Ananda Marga had attempted to kill him due to the imprisonment of the organisation's spriritual leader, Shrii Shrii Anandamurti. This theory was the basis for framing the Ananda Marga Three .

The episode was the first and only domestic terrorist event to hit Australia's shores and had a profound impact on the sleepy, insular nation of 1978. It highlights the corruption which blighted (and many would argue still blights) the New South Wales Police Service, and the hidden cloak-and-daggers nature of the intelligence services.

Sources

  • http://members.tripod.com/hilton_bombing/index.html
  • http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/hilton.html


Last updated: 01-28-2005 06:08:53
Last updated: 03-02-2005 13:25:23