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Forty-four years ago, Joseph Stipich saw his friend Vjekoslav Brajkovic sitting in a Sydney court dock with a bloody bruise over his forehead, swollen eyes, and a red face; he looked to have been beaten around the head, possibly by NSW Police.

Both were there because they had been arrested by the force’s powerful Criminal Investigation Branch – now notorious for having been infiltrated by corrupt detectives – and charged with planning a series of bombings around Sydney.

Vjekoslav Brajkovic arrives at the Croatian Six inquiry at the Chief Secretary’s buildingCredit: Dylan Coker

Both argue they were framed. Only Stipich was able to establish doubt amid the 1980s incredulity that dozens of police could be complicit in a lie, and only then because detectives said they found a detonator in a desk drawer that did not exist.

On Tuesday, the two men – originally brought together by their shared opposition to Yugoslavia’s repressive communist regime – were reunited in another Sydney court.

This time it was the NSW Supreme Court, before a judicial inquiry into whether Brajkovic’s conviction, and that of five other Croatian-Australian men, was a miscarriage of justice driven by corrupt police using fake evidence and fed by lies from pro-Yugoslav informants.

Despite denying claims they had confessed, the men were sentenced to 15 years behind bars. They were released within a decade, and have always protested their innocence. In a historic decision last year, Supreme Court Justice Robertson Wright ordered the inquiry.

A photograph of Brajkovic taken in February 1981.Credit: Fairfax

Brajkovic has waited decades for this. But he is elderly now; his hair grey, his shoulders stooped. His short-term memory is fading, and his longer one requires concentration. He was in the witness box for barely 30 minutes and struggled with his hearing.

But his statement, dated October this year and tendered to the inquiry, was more fulsome. At a protest outside the Yugoslav consulate in 1978 he encountered an angry special branch officer. “Look, idiot,” he remembers the officer saying. “I will get you even if it is the last thing in my life.”

Sydney Morning Herald article dated 10 February 1981 on the guilty verdicts against the Croatian Six.Credit: Fairfax Media

He said an interview police supposedly recorded at CIB on the night of the bombing arrest in 1979 was a “complete fabrication”, and based on information they had gleaned from an earlier protest arrest. “I was innocent of those crimes.”

When officers searched his house and his wife asked for a warrant, they told her to shut up.

He said a police officer had visited him at Long Bay jail while he was on remand, and told him he could not win; that even if the jury found him not guilty, officers would charge him over something else. Brajkovic said he asked what those charges would be.

“[The officer said] ‘A charge of attempting to pull the moon down. Another charge would be’ – and then he said something else ridiculous, like ‘attempting to rape the English Queen’ … ‘one way or another, the jury will find you guilty’.”

Stipich spent longer in the box, grilled over decades-old pictures of his former bedroom and whether a section of a chest of drawers could have been used as a writing table.

His statement, which recalls seeing a bloodied Brajkovic in the Liverpool Street Court, also alleges police framed his brother in a separate incident. “We are all innocent,” he said. “For next 25 years, I lost trust and confidence in police force.”

One of the officers who led the arrests was Roger Caleb Rogerson – now in jail for murder, and then with the armed hold-up squad – who in 1991 gave a television interview in which he spoke of the way police frequently “verballed” people, fabricated evidence and “loaded people up”, resulting in their convictions.

The barrister acting for three of the surviving Croatian men, David Buchanan, SC, sought to present evidence of systemic corruption in the NSW Police Force during that era, including a Police Integrity Commission report from 2004 that documented teams of detectives keeping stashes of guns to plant as evidence.

However, Judge Robert Hulme said police corruption during that era had been well established, particularly by the Wood Royal Commission into the NSW Police Force in the mid-1990s, which uncovered hundreds of instances of bribery, fabrication and destruction of evidence, frauds and serious assaults.

Gregory Woods, KC, acting for former police officers, objected to the PIC report. “If it be suggested that there were some stash of gelignite, which the people I represent were able to call upon for the purpose of loading people up, we say that’s frankly absurd.”

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