Stephen Fitzpatrick, Jakarta – The Balibo Five were deliberately killed during Indonesia's 1975 invasion of East Timor, according to a retired commando who was in the special forces squad that shot them.

It is the first time a senior Indonesian has broken ranks with the official line that the five Australian-based journalists – Greg Shackleton, Tony Stewart, Gary Cunningham, Brian Peters and Malcolm Rennie – died accidentally in crossfire in the small town of Balibo.

According to Colonel Gatot Purwanto, members of "Team Susi", the squad responsible for the deaths, were waiting for orders from Jakarta about whether to arrest or execute the men when, in response to shots fired from the direction of the house the journalists were hiding in, the Indonesians launched their fatal attack.

The explosive revelations are contained in the latest edition of Tempo magazine, which interviewed Colonel Purwanto after a clandestine screening of the film Balibo in Jakarta last week by the Indonesian Journalists Alliance.

The Colonel, who was cashiered from the Army's Kopassus special forces squad after his involvement in the 1991 Santa Cruz cemetery massacre in Dili, said the five journalists' bodies were then burned to destroy all evidence of the murders.

He said it took two days for the remains to be completely destroyed. "Our position (at that moment) was extremely difficult," said Colonel Purwanto, who now runs a private security company.

"If they were allowed to live, they would have said this was an Indonesian invasion. If they were killed and it was left at that, there would have been evidence they were shot in an area controlled by Indonesian guerillas. To make things easy, we got rid of them completely. We said we didn't know anything. That was a spontaneous reaction at that moment."

The Indonesian Government has always insisted the matter was closed, and last week its Film Censorship Board banned Australian director Robert Connolly's dramatisation of the deaths, Balibo.

In his written response to a request for the film's classification, chief censor Mukhlis Paeni said the film was not to be "distributed and screened in the entire area of the Republic of Indonesia" because it was "based on verbal testimonies with questionable nature" and contained "subjective issues which will potentially open old wounds".

According to the Tempo interview, Colonel Purwanto said the shootings happened while members of Team Susi, which included former Information Minister Yunus Yosfiah, were deliberating what to do with the men.

But he said the orders they had requested from Jakarta never came, and they were forced suddenly to respond to shooting which came from near where the journalists were hiding.

"We discovered the five of them together in a house – they were certainly not dead yet," he explained. "I was still some way down the hill from the house, with Major Yunus. We received a report that the foreigners had been detected. He ordered me to report to the commander, and if I'm not wrong, the commander then contacted Jakarta to ask what they wanted us to do with these people.

"They were still alive. We surrounded the house and drew our weapons on them. I saw this from 30 metres away. They were still hiding in the house, and filming from that point. Then there was shooting from that direction... it could have been that it was someone trying to save them. But our men immediately fired in that direction and the journalists were all killed."

Colonel Purwanto said the members of Team Susi had entered the tiny town of Balibo, in Bobonaro province to the country's west, around dawn on October 16, 1975, but that the journalists were not killed until "around 10 or 11 in the morning".

He said it had not been possible to identify them when they were first discovered "because none of them spoke Indonesian, while the military forces in the field could not speak English".

He admitted, however, that it should have been obvious that they were journalists "because they carried cameras and other equipment... the shooting happened from only about 15 metres away".

NSW Deputy Coroner Dorelle Pinch has recommended that Mr Yusfiah should face criminal charges in Australia – a recommendation the Australian Federal Police is investigating.