Just before midday yesterday I heard shouting and footsteps outside my ground-floor room in the Turismo Hotel in Dili. Two men wearing militia T-shirts ran past the window chasing someone through the garden.
I rang the civilian police at UNAMET - the United Nations Mission in East Timor - and crossed the garden to the tiny hotel dining room. Four women staff cowering in the corner cried out: "Go back to your room, mister; lock the door. Aitarak is here."
The pro-Indonesian militia known as Aitarak (Thorn) has been terrorising and killing pro-independence supporters and local UN workers, and they don't like foreign correspondents either. They left soon afterwards, shouting to the cashier: "We will be back tonight".
Five of the Aitarak thugs had pulled up in a truck and chased an Australian visitor who had been standing outside the little seaside hotel where many correspondents stay. He escaped but three of the militia spotted Ms Sharon Scharfe, a Canadian observer from Parliamentarians for East Timor, and cornered her in the kitchen, shouting abuse.
"One pointed to his belt as if he had a knife, and then gave me a vicious kick in the back," she said.
Shortly afterwards two unarmed Australian police officers from UNAMET and half-a-dozen armed Indonesian policemen arrived, one of whom, officer Andi Rian, promised to provide plainclothes and uniformed police protection. However, the police in Dili have been standing by doing nothing as militias increased their harassment of the population since Monday's referendum on its future status.
Trust in their guarantees of security is severely lacking. They will intervene in extreme circumstances; they provided transport for journalists trapped after dark in UNAMET headquarters by militia fire on Wednesday and unable to leave. No traffic moves and no one walks in Dili after dusk. And yesterday they helped rescue a CNN crew whose car came under fire from militiamen in the Hera district outside Dili.
Indonesian journalists, two of whom were shot and injured last week by militias, have lost all confidence in their own police. All of them were evacuated from Dili yesterday morning on a military Hercules plane.
They are unpopular with the East Timorese for being Indonesian and with the militias for their critical coverage.
This morning a chartered aircraft will take out BBC and ITN crews and about 50 other members of the international media. It was hired at short notice because of fears that it will be impossible to leave East Timor if the situation worsens, especially if the result of the referendum, expected on Sunday, is for independence. All flights out of Dili to Jakarta are booked for weeks ahead as East Timorese leave in panic.
Militiamen have erected several roadblocks on the only road out of Dili to Kupang in West Timor where the only other airport on the island is situated. An Australian trying to leave on this route was pulled off a bus 20 km out of Dili and roughed up by militiamen who then ordered the driver to take him back to the town.
Many journalists in Dili feel that the raid on the Turismo was part of a deliberate campaign to intimidate the media into leaving so the militias can carry on their campaign of terror out of the world's view.
The reason for the militia incursion into the Turismo Hotel are unclear. The real dangers lie out on the streets during confrontations where militia members, often halfcrazed, act in the heat of the moment.
BBC journalist Jonathan Head was attacked by men with knives and guns and sustained a fractured arm when he fell during the all-out assault on independence sympathisers outside UNAMET headquarters on Wednesday when two people were killed.
One of the assailants came up to him afterwards, returned his flak jacket, and said in Indonesian: "I'm sorry, but you must understand I was feeling very emotional at the time."