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| Sri Lanka |
| 6 Maldivians deported back home from Sri Lanka |
| 2006-05-23 |
| Six Maldivians arrested in Sri Lanka have arrived in town according to a Maldives Police Services’ news release in Dhivehi, official language of the country. “Parents had told us that they had seen e-mails and letters which made them worried that their children would flee Maldives and join Islamic fundamentalist groups,” chief government spokesman Mohamed H. Shareef said earlier according to The Hindu. Police at Sri Lanka's only international airport on Monday detained three people from the Maldives - a Sunni Muslim nation- on suspicion of links with Islamic fundamentalist groups, a police officer said. Two additional Maldivians were arrested in Sri Lanka who had connections with the three previously detained. Police in Maldives said that five of the six deported were arrested on Monday. Police did not comment when the sixth person was arrested. A Sri Lankan officer had earlier linked the suspects with al-Qaeda, but later said he used the name because he had thought it was synonymous with Islamic fundamentalism. Sri Lankan authorities later on put the arrested in to the hands of Maldivian diplomats in Sri Lanka for deportation. Maldives Police Services said that they were investigating the case in their press release. According to Police in Male’, capital of Maldives, the arrest-request was communicated to the Sri Lankan authorities as a guardian of one of the arrested was ‘looking for a missing 21 year old woman”. Maldives, a tiny Indian Ocean archipelago, has a population of about 300,000 people. A Maldives citizen identified as Ibrahim Fauzee was on a list of detainees held by the United States at its military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He was released in 2005 and has since returned to Maldives according to Shareef. There is no indication that the deported Maldivians have links with Fauzee. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |