Parliament’s National Security Committee to summon police commissoner, defence minister

Parliament’s National Security Committee has decided to summon Police Commissioner Abdulla Riyaz and Defence Minister Mohamed Nazim in order to clarify details of their actions during the controversial transfer of power on February 7.

The committee has decided to summon Nazim and Riyaz on January 15, 2013.

According to local media, both men are to be questioned over in what capacity they had decided to enter the President’s Office and the headquarters of the Maldives National Defence Force (MNDF) on February 7.

The events of February 7, which led to a dramatic change in government, have been labelled as a “coup d’etat” by the opposition Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) – despite a Commonwealth-backed Commission of National Inquiry (CNI) concluding the transfer was constitutional.

The committee is also expected to query why Riyaz and Nazim had assigned themselves the responsibility to push former President Mohamed Nasheed to write his resignation letter that was then sent to Parliamentary Speaker Abdulla Shahid.

The committee is chaired by Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) Chairperson and MP ‘Reeko’ Moosa Manik, who was not responding to calls from Minivan News at time of press.

Moosa told local media that the decision of the committee to summon the heads of the country’s police and military was part of wider work to research the CNI’s report on the controversial transfer of power.

Moosa has alleged that Nazim and Riyaz entered the President’s Office and MNDF HQ without having any authority and against correct protocol.  Their actions, he claimed, therefore required an investigation.

On February 7, the military and police forces joined then opposition-aligned protesters, defying the orders of former President Nasheed and calling for his resignation.

Nasheed later gave a speech claiming that should he remain as head of state any for longer, it could harm the citizens of the nation.  He therefore announced his resignation on the grounds it was the only option he had to avoid bloodshed at the time.

Both Riyaz and Nazim were witnessed at the time following Nasheed to the President’s Office, where he was forced to write a resignation letter to be sent to the Speaker of Parliament.

Earlier this week, former Human Rights Minister Fathimath Dhiyana Saeed alleged certain figures behind protests leading to the controversial transfer of power on February 7 had also planned to assassinate former President Mohamed Nasheed.

The allegations from Saeed, who was recently dismissed as the current government’s Human Rights Minister, were raised in a personal memoir entitled “Silent inquiry: A Personal Memoir on the issue of the Transfer of Powers on the 7th of February 2012”.

Saeed also used the memoirs to accuse president Dr Mohamed Waheed Hassan Manik’s government of attempting to manipulate the outcome of the Commonwealth-backed Commission of National Inquiry (CNI) report.  The government has dismissed the accusations as baseless.

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