A FORMER member of the Special Air Service claims members of the Australian
Defence Force's most elite regiment subjected Indonesian captives to acts
of depravity during the East Timor campaign, using torture techniques that
breached the Geneva Convention.
The former trooper took photographs at the beginning of their ordeal when
his colleagues were preparing the Indonesians for interrogation.
The pictures show the detainees being searched and led off to a guarded
tent at the regiment's base camp beside the Army's 5th Aviation Group at a
Dili heliport.
The former soldier, who did not wish to be named, said about a dozen men
were held without food or water for 90 hours.
He says they were forced to sit, blindfolded and handcuffed, in what the
SAS refers to as the stress position - cross-legged with a straight back.
The detainees had been kept awake by their guards and were disoriented by a
generator strategically placed outside their tent prison.
The men had been paraded separately past the bodies of two countrymen
involved in an ambush of Australian troops.
The former trooper said the detainees' faces were forced to within
centimetres of a corpse before their blindfold was whipped off.
"The first thing they saw was a head that looked like a smashed pumpkin,"
he said. "Then they were asked, 'Do you know this man?' "
But worse was to come.
The bodies could not be placed in the temporary morgue because the Red
Cross was worried about reprisals.
With no firm policy on disposing of dead militia, the bodies were dumped in
the back seat of an army Land Rover for another 48 hours, during which they
were used by regiment members for "trophy photographs".
After complaints about the morbid photos, an Indonesian policeman removed
the bodies.
The former trooper is convinced the bodies were those of two militiamen
whose remains have since been exhumed as part of an ADF inquiry into a
firefight near the East Timor border.
This was the ambush in which Trooper Ron Juric and Corporal Mark Hogno were
shot and wounded. It led to allegations of improper actions against one of
the regiment's members.
As a result of the inquiry, that soldier faces charges of conduct
unbecoming for kicking the body of a militiaman.
The former trooper said the Indonesians treated so badly were not held as a
result of the ambush.
They had been rounded up earlier in the day at roadblocks where vehicles
were checked for suspicious passengers.
"Look, by the time they were delivered to us, it was bloody hot and we'd
just received news that two of our lads had been taken down," the former
trooper said. "We also still had five patrols out and were worried about them.
"Australia has a proud record of doing the right thing by prisoners and
enemy dead and we weren't doing that."
The former SAS soldier says he has made the events of October 1999 public
because he wants to set the record straight.
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,6132481%255E662,00
.html
