A Fiji military court sentenced the leader of a failed...

A Fiji military court sentenced the leader of a failed mutiny to death but court officials said the sentence was automatically commuted to life in prison.
Fourteen other soldiers found guilty last week of mutiny received lesser sentences from the court, which sat at an army training college on the outskirts of the South Pacific nation's capital, Suva.
Captain Shane Nailatikau Stevens hung his head and sobbed as court martial president Colonel Ilaisa Kacisolomone read the death sentence to a packed court. Relatives of the soldiers broke into tears, as did heavily armed soldiers around the court.
"The nature of the military and all it stands for with capabilities to wreak untold sufferings through indiscriminate misuse of its armaments and firepower resources will always need a deterrent factor and the death penalty is the most effective deterrent there is," Kacisolomone said.
Stevens led a failed mutiny on November 2, 2000, in the aftermath of a racially inspired coup that overthrew the country's first ethnic Indian prime minister.
The attempted mutiny by Fiji's elite Counter Revolutionary Warfare unit in Suva's Queen Elizabeth Barracks was crushed after a gun battle in which eight soldiers were killed.
Military commander Frank Bainimarama, who appointed an interim government after the coup in May 2000, was forced to flee the barracks at the height of the fighting.
While Stevens was formally handed the death sentence, court papers given to Reuters showed that he will serve a life sentence for incitement to mutiny and 15 years for mutiny.
Of the other 14 convicted mutineers, army Lieutenant Charles Dakuliga was sentenced to eight years for mutiny.
The other 13 soldiers received sentences ranging from 18 months to three years.
Failed businessman George Speight, who staged the May 2000 coup, is serving a life prison term for treason after having the mandatory death sentence commuted by the country's president.
Fiji has been rocked by three coups since 1987, fuelled by a fear among indigenous Fijians that the economically powerful Indo-Fijians would gain political dominance.
Britain brought ethnic Indians to the country in the late 1800s to cut sugar cane. Ethnic Indians now make up 44 percent of the country's population of 800,000 people and dominate the sugar and tourism based economy.