Fijian Police Officer Killed During Melee

The slow-motion coup attempt in this island nation took a deadly turn Sunday night as a mob of armed young men, apparently angered by news coverage of their bid to overthrow the government, stormed through the streets of the capital, spraying automatic weapon fire and descending on the national television headquarters with rocks and bottles.

An unarmed police officer was shot and killed during the melee, the first death attributed to the May 19 coup attempt.

The group of about 200 supporters of coup leader George Speight rampaged through the Fiji Television building, smashing cameras, video recorders and broadcast consoles, then marched back to the Parliament compound where hundreds of rebels have been barricaded since Speight and six others took top government leaders hostage.

The TV station was knocked off the air and remained out of service today. A spokesman for Speight, sounding shaken, acknowledged in a telephone conversation from the compound that the mob had come from the rebel encampment.

“Oh my God, things are really getting out of control,” said the spokesman, Simione Kaitani, a member of Parliament who has been serving as Speight’s “minister of information.”

Speight himself, in a telephone interview today with The Times, insisted that the incident was caused by unaffiliated youths over whom he has no control. “They’re not our people,” he said. “They don’t act with my condonement.”

The incident occurred shortly after the TV station broadcast a public affairs program that included strong criticism of Speight, who took Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry and his government hostage. About 30 people, including Chaudhry, are still being held.

Kaitani said the program “might have triggered this group of about 200 young men to go down and make all this mess.”

“We were really very disappointed,” he added. “We had thought that things were under control. But it is very difficult when you have a group of young men like that.” Speight, a businessman and Fijian nationalist, had said earlier Sunday that he hoped the hostage crisis would be resolved by Tuesday.

President Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara has already agreed to several of Speight’s demands, including firing Chaudhry and in effect dissolving Parliament, and Speight said he and the country’s leadership have agreed in principle on his other key demands: that he be named head of a new government and given a full pardon for any crimes he has committed and that the constitution be rewritten. There was no way to immediately verify his claims, but Mara has refused some of these demands in the past.

Throughout most of the standoff, Speight has seemed to thrive on the attention of the news media, holding frequent, rambling news conferences and giving reporters free rein of much of the Parliament compound, with the exception of the buildings in which the hostages are being held. His supporters have maintained a kitchen, “Cafe de Coup,” from which they have offered meals daily to the large local and foreign press corps.

However, at a news conference Sunday afternoon, Speight lambasted reporters for their coverage, which he said was misleading. Later, about the same time as the melee in central Suva, rebels at the Parliament compound roughed up a Fijian reporter and detained eight journalists, four of them representing international news organizations.

The reporters were there to cover a meeting between Speight and a delegation of tribal chieftains charged with resolving the crisis.

At least three reporters for a local radio station were still unaccounted for this morning, a spokeswoman for the station said.