Mark Forbes, Jakarta, and Hamish McDonald, Sydney – A former Indonesian military commander has denied ordering the killings of five Australian journalists in Timor in 1975.
As an inquest into the death of Brian Peters – one of the Balibo five – began in Sydney yesterday, Yunus Yosfiah told The Age he had never even seen the men.
"I never met them, I never saw them, up close or from far away," he said in Jakarta. "How can I give an order if I never saw them?"
Peters and four other journalists – Greg Shackleton, Gary Cunningham, Tony Stewart and Malcolm Rennie – were killed during an attack by Indonesian special forces in Balibo, a Timorese border town, in October 1975.
Official reports say the men were killed in crossfire between Indonesian troops and East Timorese militia, but their families insist they were murdered.
Counsel assisting the inquest, Mark Tedeschi, QC, yesterday told the Glebe Coroners Court that witnesses would say that Captain Yosfiah, commander of the attacking force, started firing at the men and ordered his soldiers to fire. Mr Tedeschi said Captain Yosfiah then ordered three of the bodies to be dressed in the Portuguese uniforms used by East Timorese Fretilin troops and propped up behind machine-guns.
"In this macabre falsification of evidence to try to suggest the journalists had been combatants, the bodies were then photographed and filmed by two Indonesian reporters," Mr Tedeschi said. The bodies were then burnt, Mr Tedeschi said, before being sent to the Australian embassy in Jakarta to be buried.
An East Timorese witness who trained with the Indonesian military, known by the code name "Glebe 2", told the court that when invading Indonesian troops entered Balibo's town square he saw four white people raise their arms in the air.
"I observed some people were lifting their arms up," Glebe 2 said through an interpreter, and demonstrated a surrender pose. The witness said he then saw soldiers start firing at the journalists.
Mr Tedeschi said the inquest would hear evidence of an Indonesian message intercepted by a signals listening station in the Northern Territory, which was sent on the day of the attack.
The message intercepted by the Defence Signals Directorate allegedly contained words to the effect: "As directed, or in accordance with your instructions, five journalists have been located and shot", Mr Tedeschi said.
He said that if the five journalists had been deliberate targets, a possible motive was that the Indonesian government did not want footage of its actions in the invasion to get out because it could compromise Australian support for the invasion.
Captain Yosfiah, a former Indonesian government minister, now a senior official of a leading Islamic party, said in Jakarta he would not appear before the inquiry, as the incidents had been previously investigated. The inquest continues.
[With reporting from AAP.]