Sydney – A former telephone operator has told an inquest she overheard details about the fatal shooting of five Australian-based newsmen in East Timor in 1975.

Vicky Burchill-Hunt told the inquest into the death of Brian Peters, one of the five men killed at Balibo, that she listened in to a phone call from Dili to a reporter in Melbourne 32 years ago.

Mrs Burchill-Hunt, a telephonist at the former Telecom international telephone exchange in Sydney, had connected a man calling from Dili to a reporter at Melbourne newspaper The Age in mid-October 1975, around the time the five journalists were shot dead.

While checking to see if the two men were connected properly, Mrs Burchill-Hunt overheard the man from Dili say: "The five newsmen that were travelling with Fretilin, I saw them shot. They were lined up against a wall and they were shot."

Mrs Burchill-Hunt said the caller also mentioned "the Indonesians", leading her to believe the five were killed by Indonesian soldiers.

When she went home that night, she told her partner to watch the news because she expected "something big" after what she had heard in the phone call. But Mrs Burchill-Hunt said nothing appeared in the news that night or for days afterwards about the fate of the five journalists.

Mr Peters was killed along with four of his colleagues at Balibo on October 16, 1975, during the invasion of the former Portuguese territory by Indonesian forces. Official government reports said the newsmen were killed in crossfire between Indonesian troops and Fretilin, the Timorese resistance movement, but several East Timorese witnesses have told the inquest the men were murdered.

Mrs Burchill-Hunt, who gave part of her evidence to Glebe Coroner's Court in a closed session, said she had decided to contact police recently to tell them about the phone conversation she overheard.

"It's bothered me, and bothered me that the families (of the newsmen) didn't know," she said. The inquest is continuing.