ApsarA
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Join date : 2012-01-26
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 |  Subject: ~~Maldives: islanders suffer the effects of brutal police repression~~  Mon Feb 13, 2012 11:16 am | |
|  The Maldives were far from being a peaceful paradise last week, as pro-democracy islanders suffered the effects of brutal police repression.
From the super-luxury thatched and stilted beach villas of the £1000 a night Villingili Resort, you look out from palm-fringed white sands, across the cobalt tropical lagoon to Gan, one of the Maldives paradise islands, barely a stone's throw away.
You can hear the gentle lapping of the water, the discreet whirr of speedboat engines, but not the sound of angry mobs torching police stations in response to the coup against the country's first ever democratically elected president last week - or of the brutal revenge beatings inflicted by the riot police who overthrew President Mohamed Nasheed.
According to the police, 18 police stations and several courthouses were razed by angry supporters of the ousted president, but in Gan and the villages around the Addu atoll, supporters of the Maldivian Democratic Party also destroyed the prosecutor's office, the government auditor's compound where police officers live, and a police training college where more than 40 cars and jeeps, more than 100 motorbikes and 200 bicycles were set ablaze.
The Maldives Police Service said many of the islands which make up the tropical holiday paradise are no longer safe for its officers.
In several of the charred stations on Saturday, where demonstrators had looted furniture, stolen computers, and emptied the cells, police record papers were still smoking in the embers.  | |
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