Turning a hotel room into a forensics laboratory and building a makeshift fingerprint-lifting chamber from plastic and timber are some of the remarkable back stories from the biggest forensics-led investigation in the history of the Australian Federal Police.
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It has been 20 years since the terrorist attack in Bali, with members of the federal police joining family members and political representatives attending the memorial site on Wednesday where the incident which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, occurred.
Annie Lam was just two years into her training as an ACT crime scene investigator based out at the old federal police complex at Weston when the call came through about the two massive explosions in the busy Kuta nightclub district.
On arriving in Denpasar, her team was confronted with a forensics issue which, if they could figure out how to pull it off, would be of significant benefit to the investigation.
Recovered by Indonesian police soon after the bombing was the Yamaha step-thru motorcycle used by two of the perpetrators as the getaway vehicle from the Sari Club bomb site.
The intact motorbike was potentially a rich source of intelligence-gathering but the issue for forensics investigators was how to "lift" latent prints from the bike's plastic, paint and metal surfaces without using conventional fingerprint dusting powder.
The most obvious solution was to use a forensics technique known as cyanoacrylate fuming. This is where Super Glue, when heated inside a sealed environment, gives off fumes which are deposited on greasy human prints and show up in distinctive white-coloured patterns.
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But the biggest sealed chamber available in Bali was the size of a small fish tank. So some left-field thinking was applied to the pressing issue of getting the prints off as quickly as possible.
"We went out to local hardware store and bought some plastic and timber and taped together our own sealed chamber around the motorbike," Ms Lam recalled.
"And it worked. We detected dozens and dozens of prints on the motorcycle and its parts, photographed and catalogued them. And those prints we lifted were critical to the overall investigation."
The next fingerprint challenge, using the same technique, was the badly damaged white Mitsubishi L300 minivan which had been packed with C4 high explosive and ammonium nitrate.
"We figured it worked the first time so we built the same sort of chamber again, but much bigger to fit the van," she said.
Around 40 different locations in Bali and Java and were visited by the fingerprint team during the course of their investigations.
Annie Lam and her fellow Canberra-based trainee at the time, Sarah Benson - now the Chief Forensic Scientist - were among the hundreds of federal officers who painstakingly processed and catalogued all the critical case elements which built the case against the bombers.
These stories and more are captured on a series of podcasts on the investigation which are available on the AFP website, with the fourth and final episode just posted.
Dr Sarah Benson was a junior trainee chemist with the federal police's small, specialist explosives investigation team which had been established in the lead-up to the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.
Like many, she was thrown in the deep end of the Bombing investigation.
"So much of the site which could yield explosive traces and residue was destroyed or badly damaged so we went looking for intact, shiny surfaces like the local street signs, and the traces were there," she said.
It was the first time that federal police had to take their laboratory into the field. They set up "shop" in a hotel room, clearing all the beds and furniture out, sealing it up with plastic sheeting and using the cramped bathroom to change in and out of their personal protective gear.
Andy Thorp, now retired and living in Merimbula on the NSW South Coast, had been part of the AFP's small counter-terrorist team. He got the call in the middle of the night and within five hours was on the first RAAF Orion flight to Bali dispatched to begin the investigation.
"Some of the unsung heroes of the investigation were the intelligence analysts who went through the reams and reams of telephone numbers - thousands of numbers - which we used to link the suspects," he said.
"We had a field office set up in Djakarta where the analysts spent days and days cross-matching the phones and the numbers they called. It was a huge effort and was all part of building that bigger picture."
