Mass Grave In East Timor?
East Timor's peacekeepers said Tuesday that 20 corpses were found at a single site in the town of Liquica, but U.N. officials quickly cast doubt on the report.
Col. Mark Kelly, a spokesman for the Australian-led multinational force, disclosed the discovery at a news conference. Hours later, Lt. Col. Enrique Reske of the U.N. mission in East Timor told journalists in Liquica that the site, in the outlying village of Maumeta, contained no more than eight bodies.
Â"Twenty? No way,Â" said Reske, the top military liaison in the Liquica area. He said four sets of remains had been dug up and several more might still be buried there.
Kelly said peacekeepers did not know how or when the victims had died, but that the area had been secured and investigators dispatched to the scene. Reske said the road between Liquica and Maumeta was still considered unsafe.
After putting the number of bodies at about 20, the peacekeeping spokesman said it Â"certainlyÂ" would mark the first discovery of a site with so many corpses.
Until now, no single grave containing more than half a dozen bodies had been found, although the charred remains of nine people were found in a burned-out pickup truck outside Dili with a couple of other sets of remains found nearby.
Liquica, 22 miles east of the capital, Dili, was one of the areas hardest hit in a spree of violence by paramilitary forces opposed to independence for the Indonesian territory. In April, the town was the scene of a church massacre, in which witnesses said about two dozen people were hacked to death by machete-wielding militiamen.
Pinning down the number of those killed during militia rampages before and after an Aug. 30 independence referendum has been extremely difficult, but investigators now generally agree that initial reports of a death toll that could reach into the thousands were greatly exaggerated.
Written by Laura King
©1999 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed