Canberra, Reuters - Suspected mass graves of East Timorese killed during the bloodiest crackdown of Indonesian rule are to be excavated by Australian forensic experts to try and identify hundreds of people slain by Jakarta's security forces.

Indonesian troops opened fire on peaceful protesters at the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili on November 12, 1991, after a funeral march by students turned into a pro-independence rally.

More than 270 people, and possibly as many as 400, were killed in the massacre, which gave momentum to East Timor's successful push for independence in 1999 in a vote marred by a wave of pro-Jakarta militia bloodletting. "There are many families who don't know the fate of their missing loved ones.

There is emotion, there is anger there still, and there is frustration," Soren Blau, from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, told Reuters on Monday. "It was an atrocity that had such significance for East Timor as a society," she said. She said while post-independence militia mayhem had been investigated, atrocities dating from earlier during Indonesia's occupation had yet to looked at.

Blau will lead a team including a forensic dentist, a translator and two Argentine forensic anthropologists, who are world leaders in investigation of mass graves. The project is backed by East Timor's government and Australian aid officials. The team had spoken already to many families and witnesses, Blau said, identifying one site thought to hold the bodies from a massacre which drew United Nations condemnation and caused the United States to cut military ties with Indonesia. But the excavation was humanitarian and there was no expectation it would lead to human rights crime charges against former or current members of Indonesia's military, she said.

"There is no remit to anything in terms of prosecution. Our role as forensic scientists will be to collect all evidence, but how that evidence is used in future is up to the government of East Timor," she said. Indonesia ruled East Timor, a nation of about 1 million people, for 24 years before the 1999 vote and full independence in 2002.

No Indonesian security official has even been jailed for human rights crimes in the former territory. East Timorese witnesses say bodies were taken from the Santa Cruz in military trucks, while the injured were taken from hospitals and disappeared. Indonesia put the death toll at 50.

The excavation, due to start of February 24, could be delayed slightly by double assassination attempts on East Timor's president and prime minister. "There is a passage of time that has passed and really depending on preservation, we may or may not be able to provide identities for the deceased, if in fact we find them," Blau said. "Our issue here is the families and closure."

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