Word: bainimarama
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...months before he appointed himself President and put Fiji's elected leaders under house arrest, military commander Frank Bainimarama had been threatening to stage a coup unless Laisenia Qarase's government abandoned plans to pardon those behind the abortive coup and mutiny of 2000. But some in Fiji say Bainimarama, who during the mutiny narrowly escaped assassination by rebel troops, has another motive: ending a police probe into the killings of four soldiers from the mutinous special-forces unit...
...cold-blooded murder," says Ana Kalounivale, "and that's what Bainimarama is running away from." The 37-year-old widow says Bainimarama must bear some responsibility for the bashing deaths of her husband and three other special-forces soldiers. If he did not order or know about the killings at the time, she believes, then he failed to properly investigate them afterward. "Now we don't know if we will ever have justice," says the mother of four...
...commander has repeatedly denied any responsibility for the deaths of Selesitano Kalounivale, Jone Davui, Epineri Bainimoli and Lagani Rokowaqa. "I never gave any orders to kill," he said in 2003. However, in the weeks before the coup Bainimarama was under increasing pressure over the murders. Police probes and court actions by victims' families and surviving soldiers could have seen him suspended, forced to give evidence about the killings, and potentially facing charges and a six-figure compensation claim against the Fiji Military Force...
...During the mutiny by members of the elite Counter-Revolutionary Warfare unit, three loyalist soldiers were shot and-in an experience which some officers say has haunted him ever since-Bainimarama was hunted by armed rebels through a jungle-choked valley behind Suva's Queen Elizabeth Barracks. After the barracks were retaken, loyalists rounded up CRW soldiers regardless of whether they had taken part in the mutiny. Selesitino and the other soldiers allegedly fell victim to a violent paroxysm of revenge...
...Among Bainimarama's increasingly peremptory demands to the Qarase government were the shutting down of the police investigation into the murders and the removal of Fiji's Police Commissioner, Andrew Hughes. The day after the coup, Dec. 7, Bainimarama sacked Hughes, who had already left the country after death threats to his family, and appointed Army intelligence chief Jim Koroi as acting Police Commissioner. Next day his soldiers took in for questioning six former CRW soldiers, alleging that they could foment civil unrest...