| Written by Ajay Makan, Minivan News, on 08-10-2007 19:20 |
Police raided the house of a sixteen year old boy in the middle of Sunday night to grill him about text messages sent from his mobile phone quoting verses from the Koran.
In an apparent sign of government nervousness about radical religious activities in the aftermath of the Malé bomb blast, four policemen arrived at the Malé home at 4.15am and ordered the boy’s mother to wake her three sons.
The police asked all three boys to reveal their phone numbers, before taking the sixteen year old, who will not allow his name to be published, from his bedroom for questioning.
“They asked me if I had used my phone to send messages quoting the Koran,” the boy told Minivan News. “They told me they had copies of my text messages if I didn’t tell them anyway.”
The boy admitted to sending several verses of the Koran and short prayers, duas, to friends and relatives on other islands.
One particular verse, which appears, to have led to the police interest, calls on Muslims to, “fight the leaders of unbelief… if they have attacked you first.”
“I don’t think the police realised how young I was,” the boy told Minivan News. “They just knew the phone was registered to me or one of my brothers and came to the house.”
The boy was not arrested, but the policemen searched the room he shares with three brothers, apparently for bomb making. At one point police uncovered an extractor fan generator and had to be reassured about its use, the boy said.
The police confiscated the mobile phone of the sixteen year old and his two brothers, promising they could be picked up at 9am on Monday. The phone had not been returned at the time of writing on Monday night.
Clause 20 of the Maldives constitution states, “letters, messages, telephonic conversations and other means of communication shall not be intercepted, read, listened to or divulged except as expressly provided by law.”
The People’s Majlis has not passed any law permitting the interception of private communications.
The police have refused to comment on the search or reveal whether they are reading text messages with religious content.
Courtesy: BBC News
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