A Fiji High Court judge said he could not sentence...

A Fiji High Court judge said he could not sentence two convicted coup plotters because he wasn't certain whether the South Pacific nation had formally abolished the death penalty as the government said it had. Former legislator Timoci Silatolu and journalist Josefa Nata were guilty in an affair "which has all the hallmarks of a classic case of treason," Judge Andrew Wilson said, the day after a five-person jury had entered guilty verdicts against the pair. But he said serious doubts over whether the death penalty for treason had been legally removed from the South Pacific nation's legal code in 2002, or whether it was "still applicable." Because of this he could not sentence the pair and instead said he would refer questions about the status of the death penalty to the country's Supreme Court and Human Rights Commissioner. Public prosecutor Peter Ridgeway said it could take months to clarify whether the men should face a death sentence, one of mandatory life, or some other sentence for their actions. The pair were key members of the armed coup which overthrew Fiji's democratically elected government in May 2000. They had pleaded innocent to conspiring with convicted traitor and coup leader George Speight to overthrow the ethnic-Indian dominated government of former Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry. Silatolu, then a lawmaker in Chaudhry's Fiji Labor Party, obeyed Speight's call to join the coup after an armed gang stormed Parliament on May 19, 2000, prosecutors said. They said Nata also played a central role in the coup, including swearing-in another Speight supporter, Jope Senitoli, to the post of president in Speight's illegal regime. Eleven other men involved in the coup, which aimed to return political power to indigenous Fijians, have already been imprisoned for their actions. Speight, initially sentenced to death for his part, had the sentence reduced to life. He is expected to be released after 10 years. Speight and his band of nationalist gunman ended the coup when they surrendered to military authorities after holding Chaudhry and his Cabinet hostage for 56 days. Democracy has since been restored with the election of a nationalist Fijian-dominated government. Indigenous Fijians make up just over 50 percent of the islands nation's 820,000 people but ethnic Indians control much of the country's economy.