page_title: Balibo Five
section_title: War crimes investigation
hierarchical_section_title: Balibo Five / War crimes investigation
caption_attribution_description: English: Candles for the Balibo 5 40th Anniversary.
context_page_description: The Balibo Five was a group of journalists for Australian television networks who were killed in the period leading up to the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. The Balibo Five were based in the town of Balibo in East Timor, where they were killed on 16 October 1975 during Indonesian incursions before the invasion. Roger East travelled to Balibo soon after to investigate the likely deaths of the Five and was later executed by members of the Indonesian military on the docks of Dili.
  In 2007, an Australian coroner ruled that they had been deliberately killed by Indonesian special forces soldiers. The official Indonesian version is that the men were killed by cross-fire during the battle for the town. According to The Economist, the Australian Government has never challenged this view in order to avoid damaging relations with Indonesia.
  After the ruling, newly elected Prime Minister of Australia Kevin Rudd declared "those responsible should be held to account... You can't just sweep this to one side". However, no meaningful action was taken after he was elected, and Rudd refused to visit the gravesite of the slain journalists in 2008.
context_section_description: On 9 September 2009, it was announced that the Australian Federal Police were launching a war crimes probe into the deaths of the Balibo Five.
  In 2009, former Indonesian soldier Gatot Purwanto told the ABC the men were shot deliberately but not executed. He says he was about 30 metres away when Indonesian soldiers fired on the house in which the men were sheltering. "We knew they were foreigners, but we didn't think about whether they were journalists or not, because in a battle, the instinct is if they're not friends, then they could kill us", he said. He said he was with Special Forces captain Yunus Yosfiah when the Balibo Five were spotted. A coronial inquest into the deaths of the men found Yosfiah, who was later an Indonesian Government minister, ordered the killings.
  Professor Ben Saul, who acted for the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) at the NSW inquiry, said there are "complexities" in the legal situation relating to prosecuting a war crime. "It has to show that there was an international armed conflict between Indonesia and Portugal … and that in the context of that the journalist were killed", he said, adding "I think the legal case for that conflict's existence is very strong on the facts". He said that while the criminal standard of proof was much higher for the police than in a coronial inquest, the AFP have not "satisfactorily" explained whether they had exhausted all lines of inquiry.
  The AFP then concluded, in 2014, that there was insufficient evidence to prove an offence.
caption: Candles burn to mark the 40th anniversary of their deaths, 2015.
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