Exiled Maldives leader Nasheed to contest 2018 election

COLOMBO: Exiled Maldivian leader Mohamed Nasheed said on Thursday he would return to the troubled Indian Ocean archipelago to contest a 2018 presidential election and called for international pressure on the government to allow him to run.

The Indian Ocean island nation has been mired in political unrest since Nasheed, its first democratically elected leader, was ousted in 2012. He was later sentenced to 13 years in jail on terrorism charges after a widely denounced trial.

Nasheed, who had been released to go to Britain for medical treatment, said the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention had ruled that his detention was unlawful and politically



motivated, allowing him to contest any elections.

“I hope to win the ticket as the party candidate of choice for the Maldives presidential elections,” he told reporters in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka that has become a base for the exiled opposition.

“In his fear to contest me, if President Yameen bars me from contesting the elections, then, of course, his presidency will lack the necessary legitimacy.”

Nasheed has to get his sentence for the alleged abduction of a judge in 2011 revoked to be eligible to contest the poll as election laws bar candidacy of those jailed for more than a year for a criminal offense, for three years.