Maldives government denies involvement in journalist’s disappearance

The government has denied involvement in the disappearance of The Maldives Independent’s journalist Ahmed Rilwan, who was abducted from outside his home at knifepoint in 2014.

Responding to the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances in Geneva, the Maldivian foreign ministry said today the government “rejected any suggestion that it is responsible for the disappearance of Rilwan, or that it has any involvement as alleged at all.”

That Rilwan’s abduction was reported five days after he went missing had proved to be the biggest obstacle to the probe, the ministry said in a separate and shorter statement in Dhivehi.

It went on to question the mandate of the WGEID – a panel of top independent experts – in reviewing the case.

No one has been prosecuted to date over the disappearance.

Global press freedom group, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), had referred the case to the UN rights body last year.

The RSF had offered no evidence to suggest the government’s involvement, the foreign ministry said.

In its English statement, the ministry called the police’s ongoing probe “thorough,” “professional” and said the government has “treated the disappearance with the utmost urgency; each and every individual witness has been interviewed and all lines of enquiry followed to their conclusion.”

The police, however, only confirmed Rilwan’s abduction last March. It had previously insisted that there was no evidence to link the journalist’s disappearance with the abduction reported by his neighbours in the early hours of August 8, 2014.

Five suspects were arrested in September that year, but were released by the courts weeks later. Of the five, Mohamed Suaid, who had reportedly tailed Rilwan for over two hours on the night he went missing, left the Maldives for Syria the following January.

Aalif Rauf, a notorious gangster whose car was suspected to have been used in the abduction, was arrested along with another man just last month. The police now say they suspect the involvement of Aalif’s Kuda Henveiru gang in the incident.

The home ministry, meanwhile, has said that former Vice President Ahmed Adeeb, detained over a blast on President Abdulla Yameen’s speedboat, has also been questioned over the disappearance.

The police have also confirmed was an attempt at forging Rilwan’s passport in March 2014, “to make it appear as if he had left or was out of the country.”

The foreign ministry, however, fiercely defended police conduct, saying: “It is regrettable that despite extensive efforts of the Maldives Police Services, efforts that continue to this day, Rilwan has not been found, nor have those responsible for his disappearance been brought to justice.

source-http://maldivesindependent.com/politics/maldives-government-denies-involvement-in-journalists-disappearance-124159