http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/19990906/ts/timor_leadall_67.html


Monday September 6 5:30 AM ET

Evacuees Say E.Timor Capital Is 'City Of Fear'

By Marie McInerney

DARWIN, Australia (Reuters) - East Timor's capital Dili is a ``city of fear,'' with decapitated heads on sticks lining roads as militias roamed freely attacking people with guns and machetes, evacuees and East Timorese in Australia said Monday.

``What I have seen is increasing anarchy. I am seeing signs of terrified people all over the place,'' Caritas Sister Libby Rogerson said after arriving in Darwin in the first wave of an Australian evacuation from Dili.

``It's a city of fear, everyone is frightened,'' Rogerson told Reuters.

Australia Monday began evacuating U.N. staff and Australians from Dili, saying Jakarta had failed to maintain law and order since the independence vote.

Australia-based East Timorese resistance leaders said they had reports from the terror-stricken territory of mutilated bodies and hundreds of heads on sticks on the roadside.

``I've been told they could count at least 145 dead bodies on the outskirts of Dili,'' Alfredo Ferreira, the National Council for Timorese Resistance representative in Darwin, told Reuters.

Said Joao Carrascalao, Australia's senior East Timorese resistance officer: ``One person who traveled from Dili to Atambua reported that along side the road there were hundreds of heads on sticks and bodies everywhere..''

East Timorese independence leader Agio Pereira told Australian radio he had received reports of mass killings in the village of Mentiau and in a Catholic nun's college at Balidi....