A hundred security personnel had been on Himandhoo since Saturday morning, as the police seek two suspects they have linked to the 29 September bomb blast in Malé, which left twelve tourists injured.

After conducting house to house searches, police attention focused on the Dhar-al-khuir mosque, where many of the Himandhoo islanders pray in defiance of the Maldives’ Religious Unity Act, which limits prayer to government mosques.

At least seventy masked men, armed with wooden clubs and wearing red helmets, gathered outside on Saturday, promising to defend the mosque against forced police entry, “to the last man.” The group included young boys and men over sixty, according to islanders.

Nineteen police officers, fifteen soldiers and an undisclosed number of the mosque group were injured in a failed police attempt to clear the mosque on Saturday afternoon.

A policeman’s hand was severed, while a soldier was captured by the mosque group. The freed soldier and several policemen were airlifted to Sri Lanka for specialist medical treatment on Monday.

The Maldives National Defense Force (MNDF) has announced Private Ibrahim Rasheed, the soldier held in the mosque until the early hours of Sunday morning, has “a broken arm and serious head injuries.”

A Minivan Daily journalist who interviewed Rasheed and his father in Malé’s IGMH hospital before his airlift also reports he has a badly swollen eye, and bandages covering a gash wound in his side.

Rasheed also told the reporter he had been treated well by radicals in the mosque after his capture.

Despite the arrest of most of the armed mosque radicals, the police are still searching for the two suspects, who they believe may be sheltering within the island’s large radical Muslim community.
 

Courtesy: Minivan News 

Published in : The News, National News

Keywords : News, National News, Fifty Arrested On Himandhoo, Maldives News, Maldives Bomb

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