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Lankan youth further detained in Maldives
View(s):The Sri Lankan youth arrested in the Maldives last month on charges subversion has been further detained until December 22, prompting his family to send a lawyer next week to provide legal assistance, officials said. Lawyer Shabdika Vellampil, counsel for the 24-year-old detained youth, Lahiru Madushanka, said that the Foreign Ministry, had promised to arrange a business visa for his visit so that he could make legal representations on behalf of his client.
“Earlier I visited the Maldives on a tourist visa to look into the case but there was little I could do because of the status of the visa. Next week I will be able to make a full representation,” he told the Sunday Times. The lawyer said Sri Lanka’s defence authorities who carried out a full probe on the detained youth concluded that the youth did not have any criminal record; neither had he served in the police or the armed forces. The report was submitted to the Foreign Ministry for follow-up action, the lawyer said.
Male investigators are insisting that the man had served in the Sri Lankan armed forces as a sniper and was involved in an alleged plot to assassinate Maldivian President Abdulla Yameen.
The man’s parents said their son had travelled to the Maldives to take up a job offered to him by a Maldivian. However they said that when he arrived in the Maldives the Maldivian who had paid a local agent US$ 900 to get their son had failed to show up and this led to his arrest by the Maldivian police, they said.
“What we cannot understand is the action of the Maldivian who failed to show up and meet our son even after paying a tidy sum of money to a local agent,” the youth’s mother said. Deputy Foreign Minister Harsha de Silva said officials both in Colombo and Male were looking into the interests of the detained youth but he did not elaborate.