On November 4, President Yameen declared a state of emergency for 30 days citing threat to national security and gave sweeping powers to security forces while suspending right to freedom of movement and assembly after arms and explosives were found near his palace.
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Police on Friday stopped Sangu TV from broadcasting and searched its studios in the capital island Male in a pre-dawn raid, removing computer hard disks. “The station has come to a complete standstill”. “We’re verifying the sniper’s background”, Naseer told the Reuters news agency.
The video apparently reveals guys linked to so called Islamic State issuing a death threat from the president. He also said that there will be no enforcement of curfew despite the declaration of State of Emergency.
Maldivian High Commissioner in Sri Lanka Zahiya Zareer is to be summoned to the Foreign Office in Colombo tomorrow over a previous incident involving the deportation of a Maldivian national from Sri Lanka wanted in connection with the purported coup (see page 2 report).
There are growing worries about radicalisation in the Maldives.
Local media saying dozens of the country’s citizens have travelled to Syria and Iraq to fight with the Islamic State group and at least five are known to have died. Nasheed, the country’s first democratically elected leader, resigned following public protests against his decision to order the arrest of a top judge in 2012.
The unrest heightened after Yameen had Nasheed jailed in March on a charge of “terrorism” following a rushed trial which the United Nations says was seriously flawed.
An ongoing constitutional crisis caused by an endless spiral of impeachments, constitutional amendments, change of vice presidents, President Yameen’s various acts of omissions and commissions have stripped this archipelago of 26 coral atolls made up of hundreds of islands of any semblance of rule of law.
Maldivians and foreign tourists were recently shocked when the nation’s security forces displayed a large cache of weapons they had seized from the tourist resort of Baa Atoll, which had been leased to an associate of detained Vice President Ahmed Adeeb.
He said the Sri Lankan experts had suggested that a blast aboard Yameen’s speed boat on September 28 may have been a bomb based on visual observations and not chemical analysis for explosive residue.
He denies attempting to kill the president.
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Adeeb, who had a meteoric rise in politics, was also a hate figure for the main opposition MDP, which accused him of dispatching underworld gangs to launch attacks against dissidents.
