Subject: SMH: Savagery lurks in `safe' suburb:
killers mutilate journalist
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 12:11:23 EDTSydney Morning Herald Thursday, September 23, 1999
Uniformed men kill, mutilate journalist
Savagery lurks in a `safe' suburb
By LINDSAY MURDOCH, Herald Correspondent in Dili
The attackers, allegedly Indonesian soldiers, who murdered Sander Thoenes (pictured
left) cut his ear and took it away as some sort of bizarre souvenir.
The 30-year-old Dutch journalist thought it was safe enough to take a ride late on
Tuesday on the back of a motorbike through the Dili suburb of Becora, a one-time
independence stronghold that is now a wasteland.
We all had a false sense of security, after seeing hundreds of heavily armed Australian
troops arriving in the devastated capital of East Timor, and hearing from Interfet
commander Major-General Peter Cosgrove about the co-operation of the Indonesian military,
or TNI.
But they had only secured the airport, wharf and United Nations compound. The rest of
Dili remains a dangerous no-man's land.
Motorbike rider Florindo Araujo knew he and Mr Thoenes were in trouble when he saw six
men dressed and equipped as Indonesian soldiers on the road about 200 metres ahead shortly
before dusk. Although militias sometimes wear bits of uniform, Mr Araujo has no doubt
these were Indonesian troops.
"I saw them lift their automatic rifles towards us and motioned us to stop. I
tried to turn around but they started shooting, maybe 10 or 20 times. There were bullets
all around. My motorbike was damaged and we went down. The journalist looked asleep. It
looked like they were going to continue shooting so I ran away."
Shortly after dawn the body of Thoenes, who works for London's Financial Times and the
Dutch weekly Vrij Nederland, was found by friends face down behind a gutted Becora house,
his notebook lying just in front, his body battered and apparently mutilated.
American photographer Chip Hires and British journalist Jon Swain were not greatly
worried when they saw a convoy of Indonesian soldiers on the edge of Dili about the same
time as Thoenes was killed. But the soldiers, East Timorese from one of the two
locally-raised TNI batallions, stopped their taxi.
"For me it was sort of the year of living dangerously all over again," said
Hires. "They started hammering our driver - then his eye came out. He was beaten very
badly. They put him on the back of a truck and were still beating him."
One of the soldiers then pulled out a pistol and shot out the taxi's tyres.
Hires said he and Swain, a veteran Asian journalist who survived Pol Pot's occupation
of Phnom Penh in 1975, were then told to go away. "They fired in our direction but
not at us," Hires said. "We took cover in a small village and called our office
in London on a mobile telephone."
The call mobilised more than 100 Australian soldiers, armoured personnel carriers and
Black Hawk helicopters. The men were rescued early yesterday morning.
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