Children killed in grenade blast in troubled East Timor

DILI, East Timor (JP): Three children were killed and another was badly injured when they stumbled on a live hand grenade while playing in Becora village in East Dili on Monday.

Police said two of the children were killed instantly and one boy later died at a Dili clinic.

"The grenade was lying behind the bushes where the children were playing. They could not have known it was an explosive," Lt. Col. M. Safei, a local police spokesman, said.

Safei said the bodies of Joao da Costa, 13, and 5-year-old Jose dos Reis were brought to their respective families by police who found the bodies after the blast rocked a hilly area in Becora.

He said another boy, Maulao, 7, was badly injured and taken to a hospital.

Residents said the area where the boys were playing was used as a base by pro-Jakarta militias during attacks on the proindependence movement last month.

Tension between pro and anti-Indonesian groups has escalated since Jakarta said in January it would let East Timor establish an independent nation if its people rejected an autonomy offer.

Meanwhile, the Jakarta office of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) expressed concern on Monday that its medical staff were not permitted by the Ministry of Health to work at Dili General Hospital.

"Officials in the ministry have been saying that military doctors, including military surgeons, have been dispatched to East Timor, and they added that the presence of foreign medical staff was still not necessary," ICRC spokesman Sri W. Endah told The Jakarta Post.

She said the ICRC team in East Timor comprised surgeon Peter Riddell, an anesthetist, Haydn Perndt and an operating theater nurse, Judith Oliver.

Endah said the team secured permission from the Minister of Foreign Affairs on May 19 to work in Dili, but had not managed to resolve the problem with Ministry of Health officials.

In Dili, David Wimhurst, spokesman for the United Nations Assistance Mission in East Timor (UNAMET) named on Monday an Australian Federal Police officer, Alan Mills, as head of the 272-strong contingent of U.N. civilian police scheduled to start arriving in East Timor next week.

UNAMET has begun broadcasting radio programs to explain the purpose of its mission in East Timor and has taken over the back page of the local Suara Timor Timur (Voice of East Timor) newspaper to disseminate information about the referendum.

All broadcasts and published information are translated in four languages -- English, Portuguese, Indonesian and the local Tetun dialect.(33/byg)