A key witness against the man accused of the 1994 bombing of the National Crime Authority office in Adelaide has told how he hid a cache of weapons for Domenic Perre some months before the blast.
In his second day on the stand in Perre's Supreme Court trial, Allan Chamberlain said at some point in late 1993, the 63-year-old had asked him if he had anywhere he could safely store firearms.
Mr Chamberlain said he believed Perre feared the guns would be seized by police if his own property was raided.
He told the court he went away to think about where he could store the weapons and came back to Perre a few days later to tell him he had a suitable location.
Towards the end of that same week, Perre picked up Mr Chamberlain and they both went to his property in Adelaide's northeastern suburbs and backed up into a shed, so they would not be spotted.
"We would not be seen or observed by anybody else, or disturbed," he told the court.
He said Perre began unloading what turned out to be between eight and10 guns from the backseat of the car.
Mr Chamberlain later transferred them to a footlocker and another container before placing both containers under the floorboards of a horse feed shed.
He said he did not tell Perre exactly where the guns were hidden.
"I believed by not disclosing the whereabouts of the storage that I would have had a certain power over Mr Perre when it came to return or remuneration," he said.
"If he didn't know he couldn't send somebody into the place to retrieve his firearms."
Mr Chamberlain told the court he had been working at an Adelaide gunshop when he first met Perre, who was a regular customer.
Their involvement included the witness using his skills to turn semi-automatic weapons into illegal fully automatics.
The court heard Perre provided the parts needed for the conversions, while Mr Chamberlain did the work, and they split the profits.
Perre has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Detective Sergeant Geoffrey Bowen and the attempted murder of lawyer Peter Wallis over the NCA attack.
Sgt Bowen died from horrific injuries, including the loss of his left arm, while Mr Wallis lost an eye and suffered severe burns.
Prosecutors are expected to use Mr Chamberlain to link Perre to the parcel bomb used in the blast while his defence is expected to argue there is no such link on the available evidence.
Defence counsel previously told the court that Perre was "explicit" in proclaiming his innocence both immediately after the bombing and in relation to the charges he currently faced.
But the prosecution has alleged the bombing of the NCA office was a personal attack on Sgt Bowen.
In the Crown's summary of the case, Sandi McDonald SC said Perre's hostility towards the detective had grown because of their interactions following the seizure of a multi-million-dollar cannabis crop in the Northern Territory in August 1993.
The trial continues before Justice Kevin Nicholson who is sitting without a jury.
Australian Associated Press
