The month before the shooting, Roland Brown, Chairman of the Coalition for Gun Control, uttered on “A Current Affair with Ray Martin”, March 1996: “We are going to see a mass shooting in Tasmania…unless we get national gun control laws.” At 1.30 p.m. on Sunday 28 April 1996, an unknown professional combat shooter opened fire in the Broad Arrow Cafe at Port Arthur in Tasmania, Australia. In less than a minute 20 people lay dead, 19 of them killed with single high-velocity shots to the head fired from the right hip of the fast-moving shooter.
In less than thirty minutes at six separate crime scenes, 35 people were shot dead, another 22 wounded, and two cars stopped with a total of only 64 bullets. A moving Daihatsu 4WD driven by Linda White was crippled by a “Beirut Triple”, normally reserved for dead-blocking Islamic terrorists driving primed car bombs around the Lebanon. One sighting shot, a second to disable the driver, and a third to stop the engine before the primed car bomb can hit its target and explode. Very few people know of this technique, and only a handful of experts can master it with only three bullets.
On the Sunday morning, two hours before the murders, ten of the senior managers of Port Arthur were taken to safety many miles away up the east coast, for a two day seminar with a vague agenda and no visiting speakers. Was the timing of this trip a mere coincidence?
Also, about an hour before the shooting commenced, an anonymous phone call was made to the police. The unidentified caller reported a large quantity of heroin stashed at a coal mine situated near Saltwater River at the extreme west end of the Tasman Peninsula. The only two policemen on the Tasman Peninsula were sent to investigate this report. One was dispatched from Nubeena, the closest police station to the Port Arthur site, 11 kilometers away. The other officer was dispatched from Dunalley, a small town to the north with the “swing bridge” capable of isolating the Tasman peninsula from the rest of Tasmania. On their arrival at Saltwater River, the police found only glass jars filled with soap powder.
Within minutes of the officers’ phone call reporting their position at the coal mines, the shootings commenced at the Broad Arrow Cafe. Was that anonymous phone call just mere coincidence? Was it simple oversight that, in all of the government documentation, there is only a single reference to this phone call, and of the subsequent dispatching of the only available police officers to far away Saltwater River?
