INDONESIA has denied a claim by the Nobel peace laureate Mr Jose Ramos Horta that he has fresh evidence of widespread torture in East Timor, dismissing it as "a lot of nonsense".
Mr Horta said on Sunday in Geneva that he would give a video of photographs, purportedly showing East Timorese youths being tortured by Indonesian soldiers, to be UN special rapporteur on extra judicial, summary or arbitrary executions.
The pictures show khaki clad men apparently torturing young men using sticks, chairs, electric shocks and chains. In one sequence, two youths are tied to a tree and apparently being hit with a shovel. Another appears to show corpses being burned. But independent verification of the events shown was not immediately possible.
"We doubt the (authenticity) of the pictures. It is unclear "hen they were taken," a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mr Ghaffar Fadyl, said. "This is in conformity with Horta's propaganda ... using lies and distortion to discredit Indonesia."
Indonesia invaded the former [Portuguese colony of East Timor in December 1975 and still maintains a heavy military presence in the territory that it unilaterally annexed in July 1976 in an act not recognised by the United Nations.
Indonesia has consistently denied allegations of torture and other human rights abuses in East Timor, although human rights groups such as Amnesty International say such practices are widespread.
Mr Horta said: "It (the video of the photographs) shows a pattern of systematic, gross, widespread human rights violations. If anything, it shows it is not isolated ... This is evidence of a pattern of the most brutal kind."
Mr Horta, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year jointly with the respected East Timorese bishop Carlos Belo, said he believed the pictures were genuine. He said they had recently been smuggled out of East Timor.
The pictures are believed to have been taken in or around the northeastern town of Baucau, between October 1995 and December 1996.