Nine charged with East Timor 'extermination'

United Nations prosecutors in East Timor today filed the first charges for ‘‘extermination’’ against nine anti-independence militiamen and two Indonesian soldiers for crimes committed after the territory seceded from Indonesia in 1999, officials said.

The suspects are accused of targeting 65 people in the isolated East Timorese enclave of Oecussi and murdering them in two massacres in September 1999, said Mohamed Othman, the UN prosecutor general in East Timor.