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ustralia blacklisted former information minister Yunus Yosfiah for his alleged involvement in the Balibo five killings, while working with Indonesian authorities to manage fallout from the scandal, leaked US cables revealed.

Quoting WikiLeaks, The Sydney Morning Herald reported on Sunday that secret US diplomatic cables revealed that Australia declared Yunus — a special forces captain during Indonesia’s 1975 invasion of East Timor — to be persona non grata, a sanction that would bar him from entering Australia.

He later became an army general, was minister of information in the late 1990s and remains an influential figure in Indonesian politics. Yunus retired from the Indonesian Military (TNI) in 1999 as a three-star general.

In 2002 Yunus became a member of the Islam-based United Development Party (PPP), where he became party general secretary in December 2003.

The Indonesian Foreign Ministry said that it would not comment on any of the leaked diplomatic cables.

It also said the Balibo case was closed and would remain so. New South Wales deputy coroner Dorelle Pinch said in 2007 that Yunus ordered and participated in the murder of the five newsmen in Balibo, East Timor.

Cables sent from the US Embassy in Jakarta confirm that Australian officials worked privately with the Indonesian government as it tried to “manage” the political reaction to the coroner’s finding about the TNI’s execution of the Balibo five.

In a cable dated Nov. 21, 2007, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available exclusively to The Age, the head of the political section at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, Justin Lee, was reported to have told US officials that he had “reviewed the coroner’s report with the Indonesian government”.