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Issue No: 836; 9 June 2001
Mystery surrounds the lawyer for the terrorist George Speight. Speight engaged one Navin Naidu who reportedly is Singaporean born, Indian and English educated and an American resident. Naidu is also reportedly an expert in ecclesiastical and constitutional law. He informed a media outlet that he has a law firm called Private International Ecclesiastical Law Offices based in Seattle Washington, USA. But a massive international search for the lawyer's practice, and his identity has revealed that there is neither any office by that name listed in the phone directories nor any person by the name Navin Naidu working as a lawyer in the US. Search engines utilised included google.com, yahoo.com, and profusion.com. Specialist lawyer search engine directories martindale.com and attorney-inet.com also produced no result matching Naidu's claim. The searches included not only Seattle, but also the entire state of Washington, the entire USA, Singapore, Malaysia, and the UK. Numerous legal firms contacted in the US and Australia also said they were not aware of any lawyer by the name Navin Naidu specialising in ecclesiastical and constitutional law. Naidu had earlier stated that that he was here to defend a "Christian brother" and that he intended to call 300,000 witnesses to defend the terrorist brothers George and Jim Speight. He also stated that the terrorists should be tried not in the court, but in traditional ethnic Fijian court. There is no traditional ethnic Fijian court in Fiji. Under Fiji law, Naidu has to get a temporary admission to the bar to stand before the courts. The papers he filed were rejected because they were incomplete. He filed amended papers on Friday. Most lawyers in Fiji have raised doubts on Naidu's legal expertise. One unconfirmed source also claimed that Naidu has a dubious Caribbean link. |
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People's Coalition Government - Fiji Islands |
