THE AUSTRALIAN Federal Police (AFP) has begun a war crimes investigation into the murder of five Australian journalists during the Indonesian invasion of East Timor 34 years ago.
Brian Peters, Malcolm Rennie, Greg Shackleton, Gary Cunningham and Tony Stewart, all in their 20s, were killed in October 1975 by Indonesian special forces.
The case has been the subject of high-level cover-up allegations ever since.
Relatives of the men, who came to be known as the Balibo Five, yesterday welcomed the inquiry, but are critical of the time it has taken since a 2007 New South Wales coroner’s report into the deaths found the journalists were killed to cover up the invasion.
“I just don’t see why it has taken so long,” Mr Cunningham’s brother, Greig, told ABC radio. “The analogy I’ve often used is that in the 18 months that we’ve been waiting, I think they’d arrested and prosecuted all of the Bali bombers, so I don’t quite see why it takes so long,” he said.
The coroner’s report said there was “strong circumstantial evidence” that orders to kill the men came from very senior figures in the Indonesian army, some of whom are now dead.
The Indonesian government has always claimed the journalists were caught in crossfire, but at the recent launch of a new film about the case, East Timor’s president, José Ramos-Horta, said: “At least one of them was brutally, brutally tortured . . . When senior officers arrived on the scene and saw what happened, they knew what would be the consequences, so they had to burn any evidence that those people had been captured alive and then were brutally murdered. That’s why you burn the bodies, to cover evidence of torture and mutilation.”
In 1975, Mr Ramos-Horta was a rebel leader in East Timor.
The AFP said investigating war crime allegations could be difficult where witnesses and evidence were overseas and considerable time had passed.
The journalists’ remains have never been returned to Australia. Mr Shackleton’s wife, Shirley, said: “If there is a small speck of my husband left there, I don’t want him left up there.”