The Hilton Bombing – Unravelling The Mysteries

Rachel Landers is the author of Who Bombed the Hilton and Head of Documentary at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. As an award-winning film maker and historian, in her book Rachel Landers wrestles with the evidence to unravel a complex cold case in forensic detail, exposing corruption, conspiracy theories and political intrigue – and a prime suspect. The story she uncovers is one of bureaucratic bungling, territorial mishap, ignorance in a new age of terror and a relook at all that happened. Rachel Landers addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 22 June 2016.

UNRAVELLING THE MYSTERY

RACHEL LANDERS

The public history of the Hilton bombing and its aftermath is a tangle of half remembrances swirling around decades of convoluted trials, conspiracy claims, a truncated inquest, inquiries, counter inquiries, commissions and parliamentary declarations. The story had become an impassioned tale of the late 1970s, of goodies – counter culturists, the free press, anti authoritarian citizens – versus the baddies, the police, the secret services, politicians and institutions. It had more twists than an airport potboiler. Embedded in this story was a miscarriage of justice narrative that focused primarily on who didn’t bomb the Hilton.

But the fact remained that few could say today with any clarity what had gone on that February night in 1978. A bombing that thrust Australia into the modern age of terror, leading to the formation of the Australian Federal Police and our first counter-terrorism laws. It was into this wreckage and mess of history that I wanted to dive using the wealth of primary archive about the bombing that existed both in Australia and internationally. I was interested in one question that few seemed able to answer. The question people seemed to have stopped asking a long time ago – who bombed the Hilton?

The biggest obstacle to the past was the way the public story of the Hilton bombing had dominated the case for almost 40 years.

I felt it was essential to relay this public story in order to both remind people who were familiar with it (or elements of it) but also to introduce a new generation to the narrative that existed. If I was going to go back and start at the beginning it was critical that people knew where we had been.

The story we tell goes like this…

• 13 February. At approximately 12.40am there is a warning call to police about a bomb in a bin. At 12.42 am a massive bomb explodes as a bin is emptied into the back of a garbage truck by William Favell outside the Hilton Hotel. Favell and Alec Carter a fellow council worker are killed instantly and Constable Burmistriw is grievously injured and will die 9 days later. Others are badly injured.
• Within the Hotel are 11 Prime Ministers and Presidents attending the inaugural Commonwealth Heads of Government Regional Meeting positioning Australia in the Asia Pacific region. There are leaders from India, Malaysia, Nauru, Tonga and Singapore. This is the biggest political event Australia has ever hosted.
• That morning a 100 member Hilton Task Force (with 58 detectives) is formed.
• It is felt that the security of the international leaders is no longer guaranteed and the Australian Army is mobilised to protect the visiting heads of state.
• Prime Minister Fraser and Premier Neville Wran offer an enormous $100,000 reward.
• Within days a conspiracy grows that ASIO and Special Branch and possibly military intelligence have planted the bomb themselves in order to stymie ongoing investigations into their practices and to bolster support. The theory is that they (Special Branch/ASIO etc) had planted the bomb in the bin and ensured that it was not emptied for anything up to 48 hours before the blast.
• The Indian Prime Minister Desai states he believes he was the target and that the Indian sect the Ananda Marga was responsible.
• On the 15 June at Yagoona, three young men Tim Anderson, Paul Alister and Ross Dunn, all members of the Ananda Marga, are arrested for attempting to blow up Robert Cameron the leader of a Neo Nazi organisation The National Alliance. One of the arresting officers is Detective Roger Rogerson. It is he who takes down their unrecorded and unsigned confessions.
• A fourth man emerges as having been with them that night. He is Richard Seary who had been recruited by Special Branch in late March to infiltrate the sect.
• A week later Seary tells the police that en route to Yagoona, Alister and Dunn confessed to the Hilton bombing and that Tim Anderson was also implicated. A few weeks after that he adds more and more detail.
• Despite these incendiary claims the Hilton bombing allegations do not result in a case. Instead the three young men stand trial for conspiracy to murder Cameron. There are two trials. February 1978 (which results in a hung jury) and then August 1979 which leads to conviction. They are sentenced to 16 years each.
• Over the years there is growing public support for the Yagoona Three and doubts about Richard Seary’s credibility. The conspiracy claims are simultaneously proliferating.
• These come to a head at the long over due 1982 Inquest into the Hilton bombing. At the Inquest Richard Seary repeats his allegations about Alister and Dunn’s “confessions” about the Hilton bombing. The Inquest is immediately halted by Coroner Norman Walsh as there is now “a prima facie” case for murder and conspiracy to murder.
• Despite this, once again, the evidence is not substantial enough to be the basis of a trial.
• By 1984/85 the disquiet about the Yagoona three convictions resulta in the Section 475 of the Crimes Act Inquiry headed by Commissioner James Wood to examine the Yagoona convictions.
• Seary’s testimony is found to be seriously flawed and there are problems in the police chain of evidence.
• In 1985 the three men are released, pardoned and compensated for their 7 years in jail.
• In 1989, convicted armed robber Raymond Denning attempts to reduce his sentence in exchange for information that Tim Anderson had confessed to him that he was the Hilton bomber whilst in jail in the early 1980s.
• On this basis the police arrest Tim Anderson. In Queensland a former member of the Ananda Marga Evan Pederick hears of the arrest and confesses to the Queensland police to being the Hilton bomber. He states he planted the bomb at the behest of Tim Anderson.
• Pederick’s confession states that he planted the bomb in the bin and then attempted to detonate it with a remote control device as the Indian Prime Minister Desai arrived amidst crowds at the George St entrance of the Hilton hotel and was greeted by Prime Minister Fraser at approximately 2pm. The remote control does not work. If the bomb had been detonated it would have killed 200 to 300 people.
• Pederick is tried for triple murder (he has pleaded guilty only to the lesser charge of conspiracy to murder) and is sentenced to 20 years for each murder.
• In October 1990 Anderson stands trial for triple murder. There are a number of problems in the prosecution case. It is soon revealed that Desai came in the Pitt St entrance (not George St) at 4.20pm. So it couldn’t have been Desai Pederick saw. The Prosecution then state that Pederick simply made a mistake and the person he thought was Desai was in fact the Sri Lankan President Jayewardene who was also nut brown and wearing a dhoti. Then the realisation is made that Jayewardene arrived at 8 am that morning so it couldn’t have been him either. The Prosecution shift again and say that Pederick must have been trying to blow Desai up as he left the hotel with Fraser at 5.20pm. The problem here was that in Pederick’s original confession he had stated he was well on his way to Brisbane by that time. Despite all this Anderson is convicted.
• Anderson appeals and based on the problems in Pederick’s evidence wins and is released.
• Pederick then attempts to appeal his own conviction based on Anderson’s own appeal. Pederick loses the appeal but does have has sentence truncated and is released after 8 years.

If Pederick’s confession has been discredited – who did plant the bomb?

The above story is basically that the Ananda Marga and specifically Tim Anderson were stitched up and targeted by corrupt cops to cover up their own nefarious crimes. These events took hold of the intelligentsia. This is the story we tell.

For me this public story had obscured some very basic questions. What really went on? Were the police corrupt? Why did they target the Ananda Marga? Was there evidence for the conspiracy allegations? Who bombed the Hilton?

I had originally intended to make a documentary about the investigation. I immediately encountered problems with people either not wanting to speak on record or having potential subjects for whom the passage of time or indeed their own agendas had made their recollections highly problematic. All police know the problems that can occur with eye-witnesses. They misremember, they evade, they say the car was red when it was blue, the man was dead, the man limped away, the man was a woman.

How could I encompass the entire mess of this history? Go back to the beginning – to start over.

What I did have was an extraordinary wealth of primary archive sources. In 1995 in reaction to growing calls from both sides of parliament for an inquiry into the bombing, NSW Premier Bob Carr and Prime Minister Paul Keating agreed to place the archives relating to the bombing in NSW State records. In 2009 the 30-year secrecy rule was passed and certain hitherto secret federal government archives were released. There were also abundant related archives in the National Archives of Australia, the National Library, the NSW State Library, Trove and a number of international holdings.

I thought – what if I avoided the living so to speak and looked at all this material from here and around the world – the witnesses statements, the ASIO briefings, the newspapers, the running sheets, the tips, the reports, the telexes, the trial transcripts, the records of interviews, the debriefings, – what could this reveal. Rather than rely on a handful of cherry picked subjects to recount their versions of the past what if I listened to 1000s of voices and opinions as they arrived on a daily basis. At the very least one could to begin to recreate what was going on at the time. It was present tense. It was frequently verifiable from multiple sources.

Much of the archive had been collated according to the cases, commission, trial and Inquest above and they had been stretched and scattered. The first thing I did was put them in chronological order that stretched from 1975 up to the mid 1990s. I then matched it with daily newspaper accounts to get a sense what was being reported. It became immediately clear to me that it told a very different story to the one above. If the Prosecutors in 1989 had simply read the Sydney Morning Herald from February 1978 they would have known Desai came in the Pitt entrance.

Then I had to decide where to start and how to bring these bits of paper to life.

It was Detective Inspector Norm Sheather who became my guide. I describe him as arriving “pristine in the archive six hours after the bombing” and is placed in charge of the 100 member Hilton Task Force. It is he who is helmed the investigation and is he and his team who needed to solve the crime. What if I took his point of view.

With him I could combobulate, “to put together in a somewhat mysterious manner. To bring something out of a state of confusion or disarray”. I put a great deal of thought into this – I didn’t simply want to invent an alternative narrative to replace the one that I felt was obscuring the facts. Instead I, and by extension the reader could place themselves in the position of someone tasked with a monumentally complex endeavor – solving the first terrorist murder on Australian soil on the eve of our then largest international political event.

Through Norm’s perspective I could see the evidence as it was gathered on a daily basis and back at who and importantly why certain people or groups were thought to be potential suspects. It was clear that very little was known about this original police investigation in the immediate aftermath of the bombing.

What did they find?

The public story would have it that the Ananda Marga were specifically, exclusively and unfairly fingered for the crime. However it is established from the get go that many of the leaders at CHOGRM were regarded as potential targets for the bombing. In addition to the Indian Prime Minister, the leaders of Singapore, Malaysia and Sri Lanka even New Zealand’s Prime Minister Robert “Piggy” Muldoon had vehement detractors in their own countries and many had attracted protesters as they arrived for CHOGRM at the Hilton. The task force had to stay and did stay open to the possibilities that any one of them could have been the target. Certain members of the task force were sent to investigate these leads.

At the same time the Hilton Task Force needed to recreate the days leading up to the bombing and they gathered over a 1000 witness statements from people in the vicinity of the bin

Through these witness statements I could track back in forensic detail through the 48 hours prior to the blast.

Doing this demolished the conspiracy claims and proved beyond question that many of the claims, such as multiple incidents of police preventing the bin being emptied, were simply untrue.

Sifting through the primary evidence also provided clarity about the clear and sharp distinctions between the Hilton Task Force, Special Branch and ASIO. While we perhaps imagine that such organisations are conjoined twins or triplets – they were not. In fact the differences and operational discord between them had a great deal to do with the unravelling of the case. It gives conspiracists great comfort to believe that there are vast malevolent and superbly organised dark forces working in harmony and concert to control the world. The truth is (and anyone who has worked for a Government organisation would know about this) that human error, incompetence, confusion and interagency dysfunction are the primary reasons that things go wrong and indeed are the very reasons this case ended up going over a cliff.

As well as recreating the lead up to the blast, I could identify how Inspector Sheather reached out to the world for information relating to the blast. The day of the bombing, he sent a telex titled “Regarding a Fatal Bomb Explosion outside the Hilton Hotel” to Interpol and other international police agencies asking for “a list of persons belonging to international organised gangs who are known to be responsible for various types of violent crimes (bombings, assignation attempts, hostage taking etc)”.

After the bombing Information poured in from the public – some of it no doubt fuelled by the $100,000 reward offered by Wran and Fraser. Some was well meaning but most was wildly speculative or misleading such as that from dozens of mentally ill individuals confessing to being the bomber themselves. On top of this there were innumerable bomb hoaxes – there would be over 500 in the first 6 weeks of the investigation.

The information that arrived from international police agencies from 15 February on was startling and began to focus the investigation. I knew very little about this evidence. It certainly suggested a strong motive.

On 15 February (two days after the Hilton bombing) three members of the Ananda Marga (two Australians and one US citizen) were arrested in Thailand for possessing 1.3 kg of C4 and a plan to blow up the US and Australian embassy. On t 7 February two Margiis were arrested for stabbing an Indian National in Manila. On the 8 February two Margii’s self immolated in West Germany in protest over three Margii’s arrested in London on 1 Nov the year before on bombing and attempted murder charges attacking a member of the Indian High Commission. It was believed that all these violent acts in London, Manila, West Germany and Thailand were linked to the imprisonment of the Ananda Marga leader Sarkar in India on multiple murder charges.

Sarkar was jailed in 1971 for torturing and murdering six former members of the Ananda Marga who had defected. Specifically it is thought that the violence in Manila on 7 February, West Germany on 8 February and Thailand on the 15 February are linked to the denial of Sarkar’s appeal on 2 February 1978.

.

You can see why the Hilton Task Force have reason to believe that the Hilton bombing on the 13 February (with the target of Indian PM Desai) could be part of this international spate of violence. It made sense.

Going through the primary archive I was able to also travel back in time through ASIO and Government briefings provided to Sheather regarding the Ananda Marga activities in Australia the year before. In 1977 there were over 40 documented violent attacks or threats of violent attack directed toward Indian Nationals in Australia often in the name of the Universal Proutist Revolutionary Federation (UPRF). The timings of these attacks circulated around set backs in Sarkar’s case in India. In two cases Australian members of the Ananda Marga were actually caught. One was arrested placing a pigs head and throwing blood at the Air India office and the other for stabbing and attempting to kidnap the Indian military attaché and his wife.

Towards the end of 1977 ASIO were running two agents within the sect.

Despite this the Ananda Marga asserted in 1977 as they did in 1978 that they were being framed and set up by the Indian CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation) and the KGB – they later alleged that ASIO, the CIA, and MI6 were involved in attempts to implicate the sect in these acts and threats of violence.

What is less known and certainly not widely reported at the time is that similar attacks or threats of attack upon Indian Nationals occurred (often in the name of UPRF) all over the world in 1977/1978. Indian nationals were threatened or attacked in (amongst other places) Washington, New York, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Denmark, Stockholm, Kuala Lumpur, London, Denmark and Afghanistan. Each of these individual international police departments contacted Inspector Sheather in response to his original telex and characterised to the Ananda Marga as the organisation suspected to be behind the violence and as a potential terrorist organisation. All the acts are believed to be protests against the imprisonment of the leader Sarkar in India and are coincide specifically with setbacks in his case.

What is clear from the evidence of 1977 is that these threats were of deep concern in Australia especially given that the nation would host the inaugural CHOGRM early the following year. A joint state and federal task force was formed to contend with the threats and attacks. The belief was that a small group within the Ananda Marga were responsible for the violence and the bulk of the members were unaware. Furthermore it is believed that this violent inner cell of Margii elite actively encouraged of the idea the sect was persecuted by the secret services (CBI, KGB, ASIO etc) in order to greatly enhance recruitment. It was also clear that the person of most concern to the joint state and federal task force was the US born spiritual leader of the Australasian Ananda Marga – Abhiik Kumar. Throughout 1977/78 he was also known by the names (and has passports to go with these names) of Jon Hoffman, Jason Holman Alexander, Mark Randall, Stephen James Manly, David Hart and Michael Brandon. He was characterised by ex-members as charismatic, manipulative, mercurial and potentially violent.

It was this man – Abhiik Kumar who would become the Hilton Task Forces’ prime suspect as the person who had orchestrated the Hilton bombing. It is a name I imagine few are familiar with yet it is his name that is strewn though-out the archives.

Abhiik Kumar spent a great deal of time in 1977 and early 1978 traveling around the world.

A copy of one of Kumar’s passports in the name of Jason Holman Alexander was obtained by the Hilton Task Force on 17 February and revealed that in the eight months prior to the bombing he entered or exited at least 25 international ports. As I write in the book “So what? So the man is busy, he likes to travel – what does that prove?”

What could Inspector Norm Sheather tie to those dates? He could determine that Kumar was in London when the three Margiis were arrested for trying to kill the Indian ambassador. He was in India a few weeks before Sarkar’s appeal was denied on 2 February, he was in Bangkok eight days before three Margii’s were arrested in possession of explosives and was identified as being in their company. He arrived back in Sydney the day before the Hilton bombing. In fact during those 8 months he was travelling the globe there was a record of him travelling to nearly every single country – the exceptions being Canada and Afghanistan – where there was a threat, an attack or a Margii arrest for violence against an Indian national. – Bad timing? A coincidence?

It is completely clear why the Ananda Marga are under investigation by the Inspector Sheather and Hilton Task Force and why Abhiik Kumar was a person of considerable interest to them.

Despite this Sheather and the task force stayed open to and investigated other possible leads – those included radical Singapore and Malaysian students, Croatian and Serbian nationals who had been blowing each other up for years, a militant Fijian Unionist, an alleged member of the Baader Meinoff in Papua New Guinea and an eclectic gang of terrorists made up of a Polynesian communist, a Japanese shipping expert and a Malaysian Journalist. In addition to this Information continued to pour in from the public.

A desk to collect some of this information was set up in the shattered entrance of Hilton hotel. So when Richard Seary who walked up to the desk on 16 Feb and made his allegations about the Hare Krishna’s being responsible for the bombing there was a Detective sitting there to listen and transcribe. These allegations were passed up the line to Norm Sheather and were dismissed outright because the Hare Krishna’s in Australian had absolutely no record of violence attached to the them. I wrote in the book that I imagined that Sheather simply put the name of Richard Seary out of his mind and thought he would never hear it again. If he had known that in little over a month, Special Branch would secretly recruit Seary to infiltrate the Ananda Marga as an undercover agent – Norm may have retired early.

A critical development in the case occured when another Bomb was found on 25 March at the Indian High Commission in Canberra six weeks after the Hilton bomb. For the task Force it may have seemed like a taunt. Another of Sarkar’s appeal dates was imminent in early April and there was genuine fear that if this appeal was also denied (like the one on 2 February) this could result in more violent protests and attacks.

For reasons that are unknown, three days after this bomb was discovered, Seary was recruited by Special Branch as an agent to infiltrate the Ananda Marga. Special Branch dis not inform ASIO and they did not inform Norm Sheather nor the Hilton Task Force.

Why recruit Seary? There are lots of reasons put forward for this. The frustrations on the part of Special Branch being sidelined from the investigation by ASIO and the Hilton Task Force and a desire to strike out on their own.

Whatever the motives the radically different trajectories of ASIO, the Hilton Task Force and Special Branch from this time forth will be undoing of the case. As Justice James Wood said seven years later (in what I regard as a massive understatement), about the decision by Special Branch to withhold information about Seary, “while this attitude was understandable, it was not conducive to the most effective operation of police /intelligence investigations in this country”.

While Special Branch ran Seary within the sect and record their debriefings of what he gathered from his experiences in the sect, Sarkar is granted the right to appeal his murder conviction. Abhiik Kumar who has been primarily using his Jason Holman Alexander passport slips out of Australia and travels to India using a passport in the name of Michael Brandon on May 15th.

On June 11 an article (based on information from the task force) appeared in the Sun Herald stating that, “security men sure they know the Hilton Hotel bombers’. They say it is two members of the Ananda Marga – a young woman in Australia a young man currently overseas”. They were clearly referring to Kumar and hoping to put pressure on the young woman. The police had also decided to seize Kumar’s Michael Brandon passport as soon as he returned to Australia and to question him about the fact there was now strong evidence that he was with the Ananda Marga three caught with explosives in Thailand. The task force seem to be close to closing in on their target Abhiik Kumar.

So what goes wrong?

By this point in early June 1978 Richard Seary had made all manner of recorded claims to Special Branch about his interactions with the Ananda Marga during his months as a member. Some of his assertions were that there would be widespread violence if Sarkar’s final appeal was denied in July – others about their confirmed willingness to self immolate for their cause. But there had been nothing concrete to date.

Five days later after the article appeared in the Sun Herald. Abhiik Kumar booked a flight back from India to Australia using his Michael Brandon passport and was due to arrive the morning of 16 June at 8.35am.

Before this happens n the early evening of 15 June Seary urgently contacted his Special Branch handler Detective Krawczyk. They met at 5.15pm. Seary outlined a murder plot by members of the Ananda Marga that was to occur that very night. Members, Alister, Dunn and Seary at the behest of Tim Anderson were to head out to Yagoona (a quiet suburb of Sydney) and blow up the neo Nazi Robert Cameron and his family.

What would you do if you were the police? You’d have little choice but to scramble a team and take the threat seriously. Unfortunately that team included Detective Roger Rogerson who at that time was a decorated officer. What was so strange is that this was the night Abhiik Kumar was expected back on a flight from India. Except he was not on the flight. Instead Anderson, Alister and Dunn were arrested and in custody with a series of unsigned, unrecorded confessions with the revelation that Seary was an informant.

By the time Sheather discovered that Special Branch were secretly running Seary as an agent it became clear that the case against Kumar was shattered. Seary’s “recollections” and assertions about the Yagoona Three became more and more elaborate and unsubstantiated.

Then Sarkar was released from prison in India on 4 July.

Even more extraordinary was what happened next. With the investigation in tatters and a conviction seeming unlikely, a last hurrah by the Hilton task force was set in motion. When Kumar eventually arrives back in Australia from India on 9 August his Michael Brandon passport was seized while they investigated his associations with the Ananda Marga members arrested in Thailand.

In reaction to the seizure of Kumar’s passport there are two attacks on Federal parliament and threatened acts of self-immolation by Margii members. An Australian heiress and member of the Ananda Marga burns herself to death in Geneva.

In late 1978 in reaction to these new threats and at the same time our first counter terrorism laws are being formulated, a joint federal and state working party on the Ananda Marga stated that;

Australia is presented with a new phenomenon that of an organization claiming to be spiritual and non-violent but habouring militant fanatics determined to go to extraordinary lengths including the use of violence, to achieve it’s ends whatever they may be at any given time” They go on to state that that are virtually powerless in the face of such extremism. “The administrative, legal and protective apparatus currently available to the government is not capable of dealing satisfactorily with the phenomenon other than in a reactive way.

All the authorities feel that they are capable of doing with Kumar is issuing him a restricted passport that eventually results in his Australian citizenship retracted – effectively ejecting him from out shores for good.

This should sound familiar as it resonates powerfully with how certain contemporary political leaders are choosing to deal with certain foreign born suspected terrorists with Australian citizenship.

After the trials of Anderson and Pederick in 1989/90 the Office of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security issued a paper issued in 1994 that made it clear that they still considered Abhiik Kumar a suspect;

[The bombing] is consistent with other Ananda Marga attacks on Indian officials during the period and there are grounds for strongly suspecting Ananda Marga responsibility. ASIO information does not support the case against Alister and Dunn, and the information on Anderson is both conflicting and inconclusive. Source information and circumstantial evidence suggests that ‘Ainjali’ [a woman], ‘Suvod’, ‘Kapil’ and ‘Dhruva’ were directed by ‘Abhiik’ to undertake the Hilton bombing. There currently appears [to be] insufficient evidence to initiate prosecutions.

What was extraordinary to me was how radically different much of what I found in the archives was to the public story of goodies and baddies. Why was it not better reported considering much of the evidence has been available for decades? Why weren’t the international acts of violence in 1977/78 better known and why were the acts of violence directed at Indian Nationals during those years mainly framed as a specifically Australian story? Why was only as a miscarriage of justice narrative pursued by most journalists?

Was it a flawed relationship between agencies, between police and the press? A sign of the times? A hatred of Fraser? A vestige of the dismissal?

It is deeply concerning that the facts of the case were so poorly reported for so long and the actual facts of the original police investigation of terrorist murder so little known. It’s bad for everyone, the public, the press, the politicians, the police. No one wants the kind of violence we’ve seen in Belgium or France or the USA to erupt here – we love Australia and the sense of safety we have. Between the Hilton in 1978 and 2015 there was not a single other act of terrorist murder on Australian soil. The Lindt café siege and the murder of the policeman in Parramatta changed that and make us fear it’s starting to happen here again. So what to do? How far are we willing to go? There is a tension within this. These are questions are urgent. We need to have as open a dialogue as is possible. Looking back at this first act of terrorist murder knowing what we did and where we failed may supply some answers.

On the human side of things, since publication I’ve been contacted by many, many people. Some have sent primary evidence substantiating my assertions. Some have sent me elaborate conspiracy musing about other crimes. The most moving are those who were children at the time and were related to key players directly impacted by the crime and the investigation. Their entire lives have been affected dramatically by these unresolved murders and they too need answers.