Under Investigation is back on Nine next week with Liz Hayes revisiting “Secrets of Balibo.”
In 1975 Australians Greg Shackleton and Tony Stewart, Britons Malcolm Rennie and Brian Peters, and New Zealander Gary Cunningham decided to stay in the town of Balibo, East Timor, even though the East Timorese had fled, believing that as journalists they would not be military targets.
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.
In 1975 Roger East also 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. Calls for an inquest into East’s death have been rejected.
Liz Hayes and her team of investigators assemble formerly top-secret diplomatic documents to expose what really happened to the Balibo Five, a team of Australian journalists executed in East Timor. Their deaths mark the beginning of a shameful government cover-up that continues tonight.
8:40pm Tuesday on Nine.