ISLAND NEWS.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 72, 26 March 1928, Page 14

ISLAND NEWS.

OUR FIJI LETTER. | TEN ARRESTS ON MURDER CHARGE. (From Our Own Correspondent.) SUVA, March 22. Ten men, all Indians, have now been placed under arrest for the murder of the old sirdar Hamet and liis wife Punia at Vunisamaloa at Ba. Inspector Lucchinelli left to-day for the town in order to take charge of the prosecution. Some of the stolen property has not yet been recovered. Father Haumonte, who recently came to Suva in order to catch the steamer for Sydney, has been a resident c-f Futuna Island for 38 years without a break, and administered to some 1400 natives. He is now 62 years of age, and came direct to Futuna from France. He is now having his first holiday in 38 years in his beloved France, and this seems like a record.

Mr. R. C. Higginson, Chief Police Magistrate, has been made a special Commissioner, and has left for Tulagi. in the Solomons, via Sydney, to preside over the trial of the natives who are awaiting trial on a charge of murdering the late Captain Bell and Mr. Litlies. Mr. Higginson is a relative of the famous late General Higginson.

A cousin of the late Robert Louis Stevenson is coming to Suva and may shortly be appointed minister of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church. He is the Rev. Stevenson, M.A., 8.D.. Ph.D.. at present in Canada, a man with a brilliant scholastic career, and with all the knowledge of a great traveller. Ho is known to have expressed a desire to come to Fiji for some time.

After a silence of some ten months the Rewa Co-operative Dairy Company has again entered the butter export trade, and dispatched to Auckland for London fifty boxes of prime butter. The company reports increased supply.

The lately formed Viti Cauravou Society (or Young Fijian Society) is paying the school fees of no fewer than forty young Fiji lads at the Toorak Methodist School. These boys also receive further tuition and physical training at the Society's club rooms in the old Y.M.C.A. premises.

The reported rape and subsequent death of a 14-year-old Fijian girl by a Fiji man at the town of Oveata, in Kandavu, has been investigated by t-he police inspector and a doctor, who had the body disinterred. It was decided that there was not sufficient evidence to warrant an arrest. The crime was a brutal one.