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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

East Timor under state of emergency


Ramos-Horta
 (The Spokesman-Review)
Guido Goulart Associated Press

DILI, East Timor – East Timor declared a state of emergency today after attacks on the country’s top leaders in a failed coup left the president in “extremely serious” condition with gunshot wounds.

The assassination attempt Monday against President Jose Ramos-Horta and the failed attack on Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao – East Timor’s independence icons – thrust the desperately poor country into a fresh crisis amid fears of more unrest and political turmoil.

Surgeons operated on Ramos-Horta for three hours overnight to remove bullet fragments and repair his chest wounds, Dr. Len Notaros, the general manager of the Royal Darwin Hospital, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

“His condition remains extremely serious but by the same token stable,” Notaros said. “The next few days will be the telling point.”

Ramos-Horta, who won the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent resistance to the decades-long Indonesian occupation, was shot in the chest and stomach by gunmen in two cars about dawn Monday, officials said.

Rebel soldiers separately attacked Gusmao’s motorcade an hour later. He escaped unhurt.

The country’s top fugitive, Alfredo Reinado, and one of his men were killed in the attack on the president. One of the president’s guards also died.

Acting President Vicente Gutterres announced the two-day emergency in an address on national television. The order allows authorities to ban demonstrations and gives police extended powers of search and arrest.

“Our country is right now in an extraordinary situation where a state of emergency will bring us back to normality,” Gutterres said during the announcement. “I ask for your help.”

As he spoke, international soldiers and police patrolled the streets of the capital, Dili, where many shops and businesses were closed. There were no immediate reports of unrest.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon decried the “brutal and unspeakable attack” on Ramos-Horta. The Security Council in a statement Monday called on the nation’s people to remain calm and for its government “to bring those responsible for this heinous act” to justice.

South Africa’s U.N. Ambassador Dumisani Kumalo, who led a council mission to East Timor, told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York that the president was shot as he took his regular morning walk.

“One report is that they went to the house looking for him and discovered that he was on his walk and that’s where they attacked him,” Kumalo said. “He’s a very simple man … a man of the people and sometimes you pay a price for that.”

Ramos-Horta, 58, first underwent surgery at an Australian army hospital in East Timor before being sedated, attached to a ventilator and airlifted to the hospital in the northern Australian city of Darwin.

Gusmao called the attacks a well-planned operation intended to “paralyze the government and create instability.”

“I consider this incident a coup attempt against the state by Reinado and it failed,” Gusmao said. “This government won’t fall because of this.”