Jacob Kovco - Military Board of Inquiry

Military Board of Inquiry

Because Kovco's battalion is based at Holsworthy, New South Wales, his widow asked that his body be returned to Australia from Kuwait via Sydney Airport, where it arrived around 7:00 a.m. on 29 April 2006. His coffin was met by Kovco's widow Shelley and his children, parents Judy and Martin and other family members plus an honour guard of three hundred 3RAR personnel in black armbands and dress uniform, Chief of Defence Force Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, Chief of Army Lieutenant General Peter Leahy, then Defence Minister Brendan Nelson and Australian Attorney-General Philip Ruddock. Kovco's family later formally identified his body at the mortuary in Glebe.

New South Wales Coroner John Abernethy, who will now "assume jurisdiction in relation to any inquiry into his identity, the date and place of his death and the manner and cause of his death", has organised for homicide investigators at the State Crime Command to coordinate the investigation with the army's special investigations branch. An autopsy conducted on Monday, 1 May determined the cause of death to have been a single bullet wound to the head. The shot left no powder burn, and passed straight through the soldier's body, close to his temple. The bullet itself was not passed to the coroner, and is apparently missing.

A military board of inquiry, headed by former NSW coroner Group Captain Warren Cook and including former Queensland police commissioner Jim O'Sullivan and Colonel Michael Charles, was established to be conducted out of Sydney's Victoria Barracks, and Brigadier Elizabeth Cosson, the most senior woman in the Army, was appointed to investigate the repatriation. (Cosson's team travelled to Kuwait on 30 April to investigate the circumstances which led to the "casket bungle".)

Coroner Abernethy was reported to have questioned Defence Minister Brendan Nelson on his three conflicting public statements about Kovco's death.