An Indonesian soldier has admitted for the first time that five journalists including two Britons who died during the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975 were executed to hide evidence of the attack.

The reporters — two Britons, two Australians and a New Zealander — were in the small East Timor town of Balibo when Indonesian troops swept in. Indonesia has always insisted that the journalists, who have become known as the Balibo Five, were caught in crossfire despite witness evidence to the contrary.

But Colonel Gatot Purwanto, who was a member of the Kopassus special forces squad that killed the men, told Tempo magazine in Indonesia that the television journalists were deliberately killed and their bodies burned to prevent them reporting on the clandestine attack which came two months before a full blown invasion.

"If they had been left alive, they would say it was an Indonesian invasion," he said. "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."

Britons Malcolm Rennie, 28, and Brian Peters, 29, Australians Gregory Shackleton, 29, and Tony Stewart, 21 and New Zealander Gary Cunningham, 27, who worked for Australian television networks, were in East Timor to cover Indonesia's covert war on East Timor.

Believing that as journalists they would be safe from attack, the men based themselves in Balibo, where Mr Shackleton was filmed painting an Australian flag and the word 'AUSTRALIA' on the wall of the house they stayed in.

But hours after the invasion of Balibo by Indonesian troops and local anti-independence East Timorese the men were dead. A few charred bones buried in a single grave were all that could be recovered of their bodies.

Mr Purwanto, who is now retired, told Tempo that the men were shot after gunfire was heard coming from the direction of the house they were staying in.

"At that time, when our soldiers were relaxing and sitting around, suddenly there was gunfire from the house," Mr Purwanto told the magazine.

"Maybe somebody tried to rescue them. Our soldiers immediately opened fire at the house ... all the journalists were then found dead," he said.

Mr Purwanto's startling revelations came after a clandestine screening of the acclaimed Australian-made film Balibo in Jakarta last week by the Indonesian Journalists Alliance. The film, a dramatisation of the events surrounding the deaths of the reporters and a sixth journalist, Roger East, has been banned in Indonesia.

The former commando, who was a lieutenant at the time, said the soldiers had been confused about what to do with the men and had been waiting for orders from Jakarta when they heard gunfire and decided to attack the reporters' house. The bodies were burned for two days to destroy all evidence of the murders, he said.

Australian relatives of the journalists welcomed Mr Purwanto's confession, saying that his comments shattered Jakarta's "lies" that the five died accidentally in shooting between left-wing Timorese fighters and Indonesian soldiers.

Shirley Shackleton, the widow of Greg Shackleton, said: "It is a milestone. It's another nail in the coffin of lies."

Australian Paul Stewart, whose 21-year-old brother Tony was the youngest of the Balibo Five, said Mr Purwanto had shown the Indonesia's official explanation was "absolute nonsense".

"It just goes to show banning the film was probably the worst thing the Indonesians could have done because it's opened up the whole controversy again," Mr Stewart told ABC radio. "It's going to bite them on the bum, big-time."

The Australian public and the men's families have long demanded to know the truth about the men's deaths, especially after governnment documents revealed that British and Australian diplomats, who tacitly encouraged the invasion, avoided embarrassing the Indonesian Government with questions about the killing of their citizens.

In September, Australian police launched a war crimes investigation into the deaths after a NSW coroner's report recommended charges against a number of Indonesian military officers.

The investigation is targeting Yunus Yosfiah, the Kopassus commander who was accused by the coroner of ordering the murders and personally undertaking some of the killings.

East Timor gained formal independence in 2002 after a referendum in 1999 voted to split from Indonesia. Its President Jose Ramos-Horta, a former rebel leader, has said at least one of the Balibo Five was "brutally tortured".

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