Unless of course the hotel management want to advertise the hotel as the haunted, luxury hotel & challenge the customers to dare spend the night inside. (Somehow the article brings to mind the movie '1408'. Hmmm...)
THE construction of a luxury hotel near East Timor's capital has uncovered machine-dug graves containing remains of people who may have been killed during the country's occupation by Indonesia, scientists said on Thursday.
An estimated 180,000 East Timorese died during the 25-year occupation by Jakarta and the United Nations estimates around 1,000 died in violence surrounding the 1999 vote that led to the nation gaining independence.
When a property developer was given approval to build a five-star hotel on waterfront land in Tibar, in Dili's west, the government called in a group of Australian forensic scientists to investigate the site first.
'This area has long been talked about by various people, a lot of the community in Dili, as having been used by the Indonesians as a place to dispose of bodies,' said Soren Blau, a scientist at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine and a member of the investigative team. 'None of those stories have ever been verified,' said Ms Blau.
The team found two machine-dug graves about 2 metres deep, one containing seven skeletons and one containing two. 'They were piled on top of each other,' Ms Blau told Reuters by telephone, declining to elaborate on the victims' gender or cause of death. 'I can say there is evidence of things like ligatures and blindfolds.'
The team is working with the government and local community to identify the skeletons and some bones may be taken to Australia for tests. 'There are many families who perhaps might think this is their relative,' she said. Ms Blau said that Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao visited the site on Thursday.
From Straits Times, "Hotel development reveals graves".
