Australia must have been hurting for news

[Bhelliom]

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) - Nearly four decades after Australian prime minister Harold Holt disappeared in churning surf off the country's south coast, a coroner on Friday officially confirmed what most people already suspected: He drowned.

Holt was 59 when he vanished while body surfing in a wild swell off a beach near his home in Victoria state on a summer afternoon on Dec. 17, 1967.

His body was never found and until Friday he was officially listed only as missing and presumed drowned.

The absence of a body spawned a slew of colourful theories about his disappearance - the most famous being that Holt, leader of the conservative Liberal Party, was a spy for Beijing who was collected by a Chinese submarine.

"It is sad that, over the years, all of these fanciful and unusual theories about Mr. Holt's disappearance should receive public ventilation, overshadow his life and require an explanation," Coroner Graeme Johnstone said in his findings Friday.

The law in Victoria in 1967 did not allow a coroner's inquiry into apparent deaths where no body had been found. The law has since changed and state police recently asked the coroner to investigate Holt's disappearance as part of a cleanup of their missing persons files.

In the course of the investigation, the coroner's office asked the nation's top spy agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, whether it had investigated the Chinese submarine theory or had files relating to Holt's disappearance.

"ASIO responded indicating it had no information," Johnstone said.

Holt's youngest son, Sam Holt, a 66-year-old Melbourne lawyer, said the family had expected the coroner's finding of death by drowning.

"From when it happened in 1967 to now, we have always said it was a matter of accidental drowning," Sam Holt told The Associated Press. "We never gave any credence to these more fanciful theories that have been floating around."

The son described the Holt theories as an Australian version of the conspiracy theories that surround the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

"No one could accept that there wasn't some enormous and sinister plot behind Kennedy's assassination," he said.

"And the theories about Kennedy have possibly got more legs than the weird Harold Holt stories," he said, adding that he accepted the official version of Kennedy's death.

Sam Holt said one of the strangest theories he had heard was that his father had been assassinated by a CIA sniper because he was planning to withdraw Australian troops from the Vietnam War.



This was the subject of an entire news article? about a guy that drowned 40 years ago?