RI confident Australia won't reexamine Balibo incident

RI confident Australia won't reexamine Balibo incident

JAKARTA (JP): Indonesia doubts Australia will reopen an
inquiry into the deaths of five Australia-based journalists in
East Timor in 1975 since the case was closed in 1996, an official
says.

Gaffar Fadhyl, spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
told The Jakarta Post by telephone here on Wednesday he was not
sure Australia would reexamine the case because inquiries into
the journalists' deaths were supposed to have ended with the
Sherman report.

Quoting the Sherman report, he reiterated "the five
journalists were killed in crossfire between irregular East
Timorese resistance fighters and Indonesian troops".

Tom Sherman, a former Australian government lawyer who
conducted an investigation into the case in 1995/1996, reported
that the two Australian, two British and one New Zealand
television journalists were caught in crossfire and Indonesian
troops had no intention of killing them.

The five reportedly were killed in Balibo in the western part
of East Timor on Oct. 16, 1975.

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer reportedly said
his government would reinvestigate the journalists' deaths
following the testimony of an East Timorese that an Indonesian
commander ordered they be killed.

Reuters said Downer told the Australian Broadcasting Corp
(ABC) in Canberra on Wednesday: "I certainly think the account
given can't just be lightly dismissed. I think it has to be
examined."

Downer said he would ask Sherman, who is former head of the
National Crime Authority, to review the new evidence and report
back to him on whether it changes his earlier findings.

Olandino Guterres, who claimed to have witnessed the shooting
of the journalists said in an ABC television interview broadcast
on Tuesday that Muhammad Yunus Yosfiah, now information minister
but at the time a commander in the Army's Special Force
(Kopassus), had personally ordered the killings.

Guterres, now seeking asylum in Portugal, said he was
traveling with the Indonesian troops when the journalists were
killed.

Guterres said that, contrary to Indonesia's assertions, there
was no gunfire from the East Timorese resistance fighters in the
incident.

He said Yunus, then a captain of Kopassus, ordered his troops
to fire directly at four of the journalists through the windows
of a house in which the journalists were taking refuge. The fifth
was then knifed in the back after he was ordered out of the
house.

Separately, Yunus denied the allegation and said he knew
nothing about the incident.

"I deny the allegation. I never got information about the
journalists. I never met the journalists," Yunus said when asked
for comments after speaking in a seminar here on Tuesday. (rms)