Robert Garran – Indonesian troops attacking the East Timorese town of Balibo in October 1975 had good reason not to want five Australian-based journalists to escape, according to a new book.

Based on extensive interviews with witnesses, journalist Jill Jolliffe shows the five journalists filmed the attack by ground forces and troops firing from a helicopter. Jolliffe rejects claims there was no resistance to the attack by the East Timorese Fretilin forces, and that intelligence on the Indonesian attack was withheld from the Whitlam government.

She took five witnesses back to Balibo to ask them to re-enact the events of October 16, 1975 – something not possible before the Indonesian occupation of East Timor ended in 1999. Based on these interviews and interviews with two other witnesses, her book, Cover-Up, the Inside Story of the Balibo Five, challenges the accounts given by former National Crime Authority chairman Tom Sherman in two official inquiries into the deaths of Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie of the Nine network and Greg Shackleton, Gary Cunningham and Tony Stewart of the Seven network.

In the later of his two reports, in February 1999, Mr Sherman found conflicts in the accounts of witnesses made it "impossible to draw any clear conclusions as to how the journalists were killed, except to say they were killed when fighting was continuing to occur".

Jolliffe says: "There is no doubt, from testimony on all sides, that the Balibo Five had irrefutable proof of the Indonesian attack on East Timor. Had they lived to return to Australia with it, it would have earned them enormous prestige, as well as creating a scandal. It exposed the lies being told by Jakarta, and would have created immense discomfort for the Whitlam Labor government."

Balibo is important not just because of the Australian government's evasions over the journalists' deaths but because this was symptomatic of Canberra's approach to Indonesia and East Timor for 24 years. Jolliffe says there is credible prima facie evidence concerning the killings against the commander of the Indonesian operation, Yuhus Yosfiah, who later became information minister in the Habibie government, and another man known as Chris.

She says there was overall agreement from her witnesses on the timing and direction of the Indonesian attack, the number of casualties and the activities and location of the journalists just before they were killed. All but two of the seven witnesses agreed there had been stiff resistance from Fretilin, which continued at the time of the deaths.

"All said there had been no firing from the house where the journalists were, and that they were civilians attempting to surrender when they died. There were disagreements about whether most of the reporters had been killed inside or outside the house, and whether they died by the knife or the gun. The general picture from the seven eyewitnesses is that the first four to die were around the front of the house, perhaps retreating inside it at the last minute of the Indonesian advance," she writes. "Most witnesses thought these four had been shot, not stabbed."