The grisly task that helped track down a man who murdered dozens of Aussies

Warning: This story contains details that some readers may find distressing.

“They actually take the skin off the skull, rebuild the head to the shape it would have been, and then put the skin… back over the head.”

It sounds like a gruesome crime, but in actual fact it was the complete opposite: a crucial step undertaken by Australian Federal Police that helped track down a man who murdered hundreds of innocent civilians, including dozens of Australians.

That was then-AFP detective superintendent David Craig, who led the federal police response to the 2005 Bali bombings.

Three of the most important pieces of the puzzle in tracking down the men behind the deadly attack were the heads of the trio of suicide bombers, which had been quickly retrieved by Indonesian authorities.

“The heads had been found in each bombsite, which they quite often are, because they’re using a backpack,” Craig told bombing survivor Joe Frost on the latter’s podcast, Forgotten Bombs.

“It will usually just take out the middle torso… the blast then leaves, usually from the hips down and from the mid-shoulders, mid-neck up.”

With Indonesian police getting no leads after issuing the gruesome images of the bombers’ deformed heads, Craig had the AFP’s forensics team reconstruct them to get pictures the public were actually able to recognise.

“Being able to identify who the bombers were, it’s just a very important line of inquiry,” he said. 

“So I spoke to our head of forensics as to what he would be able to do.

“And so I sent them up to Jakarta and they… did rebuild the heads.”

Sometimes referred to as the “second Bali bombings” or just simply “Bali two”, the 2005 terror attack is far less well-known than its 2002 predecessor that killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.

On the evening of October 1, 2005, three bombs were detonated in quick succession: one in the heart of Kuta, and two at Jimbaran Beach. 

Four Australians – as well as 15 Indonesians and one Japanese citizen – were killed and more than a dozen more injured.

One of them was Frost, who had been at Nyoman cafe at Jimbaran, on holiday from the NSW city of Newcastle, when the bombs went off.

Two people to his left had to be flown to Singapore for treatment for their injuries, while two to his right – Colin and Fiona Zwolinski – were killed by the blast.

“I had come away with blown-out eardrums,” Frost, whose legs were also significantly scarred, said on Forgotten Bombs. 

“Beyond ‘wow, that’s lucky’, I had no explanation for how it was that I hadn’t ended up in a hospital bed – or in the morgue.”

The two main suspects behind the attack were Noordin Top – who was tracked down and killed by police in 2009 – and Azhari Husin.

Both were members of the Al-Qaeda-linked Islamic terror group Jemaah Islamiyah, and both were also involved in the 2002 Bali bombings.

After the AFP had reconstructed the bombers’ heads, police received a string of leads which eventually led Indonesian police to a home in East Java, and a shootout with Azhari.

“An Indonesian police officer I know yelled out through the loudspeaker saying, you know, ‘Azhari, we know you’re in there. You need to come out. We have you surrounded, come out quickly,'” Craig said.

“And that was answered simply with automatic gunfire coming from the house almost immediately.”

The bomb-maker threw 11 explosives at police as he attempted to kill as many officers as possible, before he was shot and – as best as authorities could ascertain – ordered an associate who was with him to run out with a suicide vest.

“But unfortunately for Azhari… and quite fortunate for all of us, he actually flicked the wrong switch and detonated himself instantaneously, which definitely killed Azhari,” Craig said.

“Azhari was alive at the time of that bomb, I’m sure… I’ve also read things that he detonated himself and things like that, but he didn’t.”

Released in the lead-up to the 20th anniversary of the terror attack earlier this month, Frost said Forgotten Bombs had originally been planned as a story about survivors.

But it morphed into a long and wide-ranging project that included interviewing both a Jemaah Islamiyah founding member and former prime minister Tony Abbott, who was in Bali when the attack was carried out.

“The seemingly simple question of ‘who did this?’ became far more complex and engrossing than I had ever imagined, spanning the globe from Bali to Guantanamo Bay, Australia to Afghanistan,” he said.

“I wanted to properly tell the survivors’ stories – not just the tragedy and the trauma, but also the experiences of bravery, mateship and even humour,” he added.

The restaurant where Frost had been during the attack reopened a few weeks later, when one of its first post-bombing customers was Craig.

“I wanted to send a message that Australians aren’t going to be bullied,” he told Frost. 

“And so I booked the very table that you would have been sitting at that night, on the night that it opened, and I invited the Indonesian police as well. 

“It wasn’t a particularly relaxing meal, but for me, as an Australian, I wanted to stick it in the face of these pricks…

“There was shrapnel marks on the table and none of us really felt like eating, but we sat there and we talked and we, you know, just showed a unified front.”