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)