| Subject: On a
cool, green hill, investigators dig for E Timor victim
On a cool, green hill, investigators dig
for East Timor victim
RAILAKO, East Timor, Dec 23 (AFP) - There
was not much left of body number 258, but a team of UN civilian police
officers and soldiers from the International Force for East Timor (Interfet)
set out Thursday to find as much as they could.
An unsettling marker told them where to
look. A black shirt hung by its outstretched sleeves from some vines,
above a small pile of rocks on a mound of earth about 30 minutes' drive
southwest of the capital Dili.
A soiled pair of trousers with a belt
still looped in them rested on the stones in plain view of motorists
passing on this road to Ermera.
Tomas Castanon and Friedrich Prax, two
police officers from the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor, had
discovered the burial site as they drove along the windy mountain road
enveloped by thick vegetation.
Prax is a veteran of the first UN mission
here, which supervised the August 30 ballot when East Timorese voted
overwhelmingly for independence from Indonesia.
Now Prax has returned to help investigate
the many murders linked to an Indonesian-backed campaign of terror ahead
of and after the vote.
On Thursday, Prax and Castanon went back
to the burial site with a three-man team from the investigation section of
Interfet's Military Police Company.
As a sign of respect for the dead, local
residents had placed a banana, a mango, a bottle of water and some money
on the stones.
Staff Sergeant Byron Hall videotaped the
scene. The investigators cut down the black shirt and stretched it out on
a white plastic bag they had unzipped and laid out on the ground.
Wearing rubber gloves, Hall lifted up the
tattered trousers. In the pocket he found a blue headband espousing the
pro-Indonesia autonomy option from the August 30 ballot.
Militias, backed by the Indonesian armed
forces, forced people to wear pro-autonomy headbands and other
paraphernalia.
Hall laid out the pants and the headband
on the white bag and then explained his findings to the video camera now
operated by Corporal Wayne Fee.
The shirt bore the words "heavy
metal" and was decorated with pictures of skulls beneath a small hole
about the width of a man's finger.
"Doesn't appear to be any staining
around the hole," Hall told the camera.
He turned back to the mound of dirt and
began to move away the stones. Ants crawled in the soil around a thick
piece of yellowed bone about 30 centimetres (12 inches) long.
Sergeant Alan Cooper, a military
policeman from the Royal Australian Air Force, unzipped another white bag
and placed the single bone in the middle of it.
Cooper took still photographs and Fee
continued filming as Hall gently dug with a shovel into the mound of dirt
where the bone had rested.
After sifting through a few shovelfuls,
they decided there was nothing else in that spot.
"It's just a mound but you've got to
have a look anyway," Hall said.
Prax climbed a short distance down the
slope and found a discarded Indonesian army ration can. Castanon and Hall
descended another 10 metres (yards) through the bush.
"We're going to need the camera down
here," Hall called. "There's another bone here in a bag,"
he said before emerging with the pieces in his hand.
They laid them out on the white bag as
well -- three ribs, a lower jaw with most of the teeth missing, a tooth,
and another piece of bone that looked like it came from a yellowed, broken
bowl.
Fee recorded them all in a small
notebook.
Then they measured the distance of the
small grave from the edge of the road, and the distance down the slope
which stretched out toward the sea far to the north.
"You have any indications concerning
the identity?" Prax asked Hall. There was nothing, but Prax was
optimistic.
"This shirt, everybody has seen. It
should be possible to find out the identity."
"Do you want a body number for
this?" Hall asked the policeman. "258."
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