New inquest on banker

Press, 10 February 1981, Page 8

New inquest on banker

NZPA Sydney The body of a Sydney man said to be at the centre of a mystery involving a failed merchant bank, drug smuggling, and the American Central Intelligence Agency has been positively identified by the police for a second time after a courtordered exhumation last week. The police yesterday told the Sydney Coroner’s Court that scientific tests conclusively proved that the body exhumed last Friday was that. of Frank Nugan whose body was found at Lithgow in Central New South Wales last January with a bullet wound in the head and a .30 rifle beside it. • An inquest in Lithgow last

year found that Nugan had committed suicide. The Attorney-General of New South Wales (Mr Frank Walker) last week obtained a Supreme Court order quashing the Lithgow inquest after an unnamed Sydney man reported to the Corporate Affairs Commission that he had seen Nugan in a bistro in Georgia, in the United States, last November. The body which was the subject of the Lithgow inquest was exhumed from Sydney’s Northern Suburbs Cemetery last Friday and examined by Nugan’s dentist and a police fingerprint expert. Both said that the body was that of Nugan. The Attorney-General’s action in seeking the second inquest has irked the New

South Wales police who have said that he had ignored their experts’ reports. Nugan was a principal of the Nugan-Hand merchant bank, which failed owing millions of dollars and is alleged to have been involved in drugs and arms deals and has been accused of laundering C.I.A. money. Nugan’s partner, an American, Michael Hand,* a former C.I.A. agent, disappeared last year. Suspicions about Nugan’s death were strengthened at the first -inquest when his friends and relatives said that suicide was something he would not even have contemplated. The inquest yesterday was adjourned after the identification evidence until March 5.