Balibo Five 'deliberately killed'

A protester outside the Glebe Coroner's Court in Sydney May 8, 2007 where the inquest into the death of Brian Peters, one of five Australian-based journalists killed in Balibo, East Timor in 1975, was held.

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Indonesian soldiers deliberately killed the Balibo Five to cover up their 1975 invasion of East Timor, a retired Indonesian army colonel has admitted.

Gatot Purwanto, a special forces commando when he took part in the 1975 assault on Balibo, is the first senior Indonesian military figure to publicly contradict the official explanation that the Australia-based journalists, which included a New Zealand cameraman, were killed in crossfire.

"If we let them leave they would say that this was the Indonesian invasion," Purwanto told Indonesia's Tempo magazine.

"If we let them go there would be evidence."

Speaking after seeing Robert Connolly's Balibo, the Australian film about the killings that has been banned in Indonesia, Purwanto said he and his fellow soldiers had been surprised to find the men in the small East Timorese border town.

Purwanto claims his superior Yunus Yosfiah - who has been accused of ordering the killings - asked Jakarta whether his special forces squad, known as Team Susi, should execute or capture the men.

But the soldiers were forced to take action before Jakarta could respond because they were "provoked" by gunfire from the direction of the house where the journalists were hiding, Purwanto said.

"Probably, it was someone trying to save them," said Purwanto, who later became Indonesian intelligence chief in East Timor.

"But our members immediately fired in that direction and all the journalists died."

Afterwards, soldiers took the bodies to another house to be burned, Purwanto said.

"To make it easier we tried to make them disappear," said Purwanto, who now works in private security.

"We would say that we didn't know anythieaction at that time."

Nonetheless, Purwanto - who was discharged from the military over his involvement in the 1991 Santa Cruz Cemetery massacre in Dili - said Connolly's film overdramatised the killings.

Meanwhile, Indonesia's chief censor Mukhlis Paeni has finally formally explained the reasons for the Film Censorship Agency's ban.

The film was based on verbal testimony of a "questionable nature", Paeni said in his written explanation.

"We deemed that Balibo is not proper to be screened because it contains subjective issues which will potentially open old wounds of questionable objectivity," he said.

Yosfiah is likely to be a firm focus of the Australian Federal Police war crimes investigation into the Balibo killings.

The AFP launched the probe earlier this year, almost two years after a coronial inquest concluded Indonesian forces deliberately killed the journalists.

The inquest dismissed claims by successive Australian and Indonesian governments that Greg Shackleton, Brian Peters, Malcolm Rennie, Gary Cunningham and Tony Stewart were the victims of crossfire and linked Yosfiah to their murders.