Manuel Gaspar Soares da Silva

Manuel Gaspar Soares da Silva was born on 16 August 1959 in the aldeia of Uma Ki'ik, in the suco of Uaitame, Uato-Lari, in the Viqueque district of Portuguese Timor.

In 1975, when he was about sixteen, he witnessed the killing of the Balibo Five, the five journalists working for Australian television networks who were killed when Indonesian forces attacked the town of Balibo, near the border with Indonesian West Timor, in October that year.

He later studied education, gaining a bachelor's degree, and worked as a teacher.

Soares da Silva was a long-time member of FRETILIN. He served as the party's coordinator in the Uato-Lari subdistrict and attended its first, second and third congresses.

In February 2007 he travelled to Sydney to give evidence as an eyewitness at the New South Wales coronial inquest into the deaths of the Balibo Five. He listed this testimony among the official missions in his parliamentary biography.

He was elected to the National Parliament of Timor-Leste for FRETILIN at the 2012 election and took his seat on 30 July 2012, at the start of the third legislature. He was a member of Committee B, the parliamentary committee for foreign affairs, defence and national security. FRETILIN did not include him on its list for the 2017 election, and he left parliament when the legislature ended in 2017. He continued to work for the party and was one of its delegates at the time of his death.

Soares da Silva came from Uato-Lari in Viqueque and kept close ties to the area. Reports of his death mention his sister Jacinta, who lived in Caraubalo, Viqueque. Few other details of his private life have been published.

Manuel Gaspar Soares da Silva died on 15 August 2026 in Caraubalo, Viqueque, one day before his 67th birthday.

According to Jacob Soares Sarmento of the Viqueque Vila health centre, quoted by the national news agency Tatoli, he left Uato-Lari that morning and reached Viqueque at about seven o'clock, intending to attend a FRETILIN conference and to welcome the party's secretary-general, Mari Alkatiri. Feeling unwell, he stopped his car near a relative's home, went back into the car after breakfast and lay down to sleep. Party organisers who tried to phone him received no answer and contacted his sister, who found him unresponsive. The car window was broken to reach him.

The health centre said he had died at around nine in the morning and that the family found him at about three in the afternoon. Because he had been dead for some hours, doctors at the health centre could not examine him to establish the cause, and his body was taken to his sister's house in Caraubalo to await a national autopsy team. The cause of death had not been made public at the time of the first reports.

Soares da Silva is remembered as a teacher and FRETILIN organiser from Viqueque who represented his party in the National Parliament for a full term. His testimony as an eyewitness to the deaths of the Balibo Five made him part of one of the most important efforts to establish the truth about the killings of 1975, in which the Sydney inquest found in 2007 that the five men had been killed by Indonesian forces.