Timor deaths investigation after 35 years
AUSTRALIAN police have announced a long-awaited war crimes investigation into the deaths of the “Balibo Five” journalists killed by Indonesian troops in 1975.
The surprise move came two years after a coroner’s investigation ruled the journalists had been murdered in an East Timor border town as they tried to surrender to invading Indonesian forces.
The five — Australians Greg Shackleton and Tony Stewart, Britons Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie and New Zealander Gary Cunningham — had witnessed the invasion of East Timor, then still a Portuguese colony, by Indonesian forces.
The government has always maintained they died in crossfire as Indonesian troops fought East Timorese Fretilin rebels — a version of events that has been accepted by successive Australian governments.
Sydney coroner Dorelle Pinch found in 2007 that they were murdered to keep the invasion a secret. She called for war crimes charges against a number of Indonesian generals.
The coroner said they had been “shot and or stabbed deliberately by members of the Indonesian Special Forces, including Captain Yunus Yosfiah”.
Yunus Yosfiah, who became Indonesia’s information minister in the late 1990s, has admitted leading the attack but denied involvement in the journalists’ deaths.
Indonesia’s foreign ministry dismissed the inquest’s findings, saying that for Jakarta it was a “closed case”.