The South Australian NCA Bombing Trial

The South Australian NCA Bombing Trial
Three police officers have been injured while trying to arrest a man with a knife in Sydney's CBD. (Mark Kolbe/Getty Images)
AAP
By AAP
10/18/2020
Updated:
10/18/2020

The man accused of bombing the National Crime Authority office in Adelaide is to go on trial, more than 25 years after the blast that killed one person and seriously injured a second.

Domenic Perre has been charged with murder and attempted murder over the 1994 explosion, which killed Detective Sergeant Geoffrey Bowen and injured NCA lawyer Peter Wallis.

The case, which is listed to open with legal argument on Oct 19, will be presided over by Justice Kevin Nicholson.

There will be no jury after Perre opted to be tried by judge alone.

Perre was first charged over the bombing soon after the incident but the charges were dropped six months later because of a lack of evidence.

He was arrested again in 2018 following a joint investigation, lasting more than two years, by a number of state and federal authorities including the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission.

Little detail has been revealed about the new evidence against the 63-year-old.

But at an earlier hearing in Adelaide Magistrates Court, Perre’s defence argued the only new material was a “conga line of informants”.

The court was told those people were all “motivated by self-interest” and “unconstrained by morality”.

The NCA bombing has been one of South Australia’s highest-profile cases, with a $1 million reward offered in 2008 for information leading to the conviction of the person or people responsible.

Tim Dornin in Adelaide