The house, on the outskirts of East Timor’s capital, was turned into a mere shell. The six people inside — five women and a child — were little more than burnt and broken skeletons.
Attackers came in the middle of the night, broke the windows of the concrete dwelling, doused it in petrol and set it ablaze.
”This is a revenge attack,” said Jose Moucho, standing outside the remains of the house on Friday morning. ”It’s just like 1999.”
That year is etched into the memory of the East Timorese, a time when the vote for independence from Indonesia descended into brutal violence that left nearly 200 000 people dead.
The unrest that erupted in one of the world’s newest and poorest nations again this week shows no signs of becoming that bad, but for many here that fear is still fresh — and the violence a terrible reminder of the recent past.
Some locals said the dead were relatives of the Interior Minister, Rogerio Lobato, but nobody seemed to know — or was willing to say — why they had been killed.
The house sits in a relatively well-off suburb. Around the outside is a 2,5m wall, topped with shards of glass, that was meant to keep out any intruders.
But they managed to get in — four men, dressed in black and wearing balaclavas, neighbours said — all the same.
In one cupboard of the house, the bodies of a woman and a child lay curled next to each other, as if she were trying to protecting it until the very end. Another woman was crammed against the wall in the furthest corner, as far as she could go before the flames engulfed her.
Their arms and legs were reduced to tiny charred stumps. A nun in a brown habit stood over the corpses and prayed, a faint smell of burnt flesh lingering in the air. Others left pages of the Bible and images of Catholic saints on the windowsill of the gutted building.
Joseph Rees, the United States ambassador to East Timor, came to see the carnage for himself. ”That anything happened like this is just a terrible thing,” he said. ”We saw the worst day in the history of this country since independence, and we’re all hopeful things will get a lot better very dramatically.”
Neighbours, some of them unable to control their weeping, came to lay flowers beside the blackened bodies.
They called for the Australian troops who have come to end the bloodshed in East Timor to step up patrols, and said they feared the attackers would return when night fell again.
”They are still spying on us and it’s not safe in this area,” one man said.
Australian helicopters whirred in the distance, as Australian troops began fanning out in the streets, hoping to stop any more violence.
”I am very happy because their arrival will protect our lives,” said Manuel Molina, who works as a police officer at the airport. But he had his automatic pistol just in case. — Sapa-AFP