THE SCIENCE OF BRINGING JUSTICE
Forensic specialists took their skills to Bali to determine
IT was the phone call that would change Sarah Benson’s life.
As a trainee chemist with the Australian Federal Police, Benson was working a Sunday shift when the lab phone rang.
“First it was one of my friends or colleagues to say ‘have you heard the news?’ And then the phone just kept ringing,” Benson, who had joined the AFP only three years earlier, recalled.
It was just after 11pm on Saturday, October 12, 2002, when a man wearing an explosive device filled with metal shrapnel blew himself up in Paddy’s bar in the Balinese tourist town of Kuta.
Seconds later, as terrified people fled on to the street, another powerful bomb exploded in a car parked outside the Sari Club.
The bombings killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, in a terrorist attack linked to the Jemaah Islamiah Islamic extremist group.
Benson and her then boss, senior AFP chemist David Royds, were crucial to solving one of the first investigations of its kind – where forensic chemists were sent to the front line in a mobile laboratory. Royds, who first came up with the theory the explosions were the work of suicide bombers, arrived in Bali two days after the attack. Benson, who was just 25, would join him later that week after spending the first few days searching for explosive residue on victims’ clothing as their bodies were returned home to their grieving families.
As a young trainee, she said she was “probably a little bit protected” in the lab in Canberra before being sent to Bali.
“But over there, you know, you’re living and breathing it, you’re feeling it, you’re seeing what’s there. It’s a little harder to disconnect from that,” she said. A police headquarters had been established at Kuta’s Kartika Plaza Hotel, where the small team of forensic chemists built a temporary lab.
The forensics team embarked on a months-long investigation with interstate and international police colleagues which involved multiple trips – often at a moment’s notice – between Bali and Canberra.
“In the early stages, you’re chasing red herrings all the time,” Royds said, recalling a moment in which he thought a linked, non-fatal bombing at the US consulate in Bali might have been connected to the Irish Republican Army. Neither Benson nor Royds will forget their first visit to the obliterated nightclub Paddy’s. “You can never undo that tragedy for the victims and their families. But I think (there was) a sense we were able to help in some way to support justice,” Benson said.
Royds gave evidence in court against bombmaker Umar Patek, who was convicted for his role in the bombings.
“It gave me a lot of closure,” he said. “I was actually able to get up and say things that I felt as though the judges should know about for the sake of the victims.”
Benson and Royds were joined by a string of Australian Disaster Victim Identification specialists who would help bring those terrorists to justice.
Professor Chris Griffiths, a forensic odontologist, and the first scientific vice-chairman of Interpol’s Disaster Victim Identification Committee, was sent to Bali to help identify people using their teeth in Operation Alliance.
Professor Griffiths, from the Westmead Centre for Oral Health, said “during the 2002 Bali bombings, 60 per cent of the victims were identified with dental evidence within … two weeks”.
“… some of the more difficult cases were identified through DNA,” Prof Griffiths said.
He was joined by police from around Australia, including Brisbane-based Senior Sergeant Ken Rach, who had more than 20 years’ experience in DVI and played a major role in the development of the response plan within hours of arriving.
Sen Sgt Rach was the only police officer in Australia at the time dedicated to a full-time DVI position. He returned to Bali four times to help and was awarded an OAM for his work.
The Indonesian government has announced Patek will be granted early parole halfway through his 20-year sentence.