Earlier this year, East Timorese President Jose Ramos Horta called on Indonesia to accept responsibility for the deaths, saying he was in Balibo at the time and had always doubted Jakarta's account.

Television journalists Greg Shackleton and Malcolm Rennie, cameramen Gary Cunningham and Brian Peters as well as sound recordist Tony Stewart died Oct 16, 1975, after trying to capture images of Indonesian troops crossing the border.

East Timor, a former Portuguese colony, was annexed by Indonesia in 1976 and had to wait for full independence until 2002.

According to a report by a UN-sponsored truth commission, the Indonesian occupation led to about 100,000 deaths by killings, starvation and disease.

Australian governments had accepted Jakarta's assertion that the men were killed in a crossfire, but in January 2008, the Attorney General's Department referred the case to the police after the Sydney coroner's finding.