Getting away with murder in the Maldives
Murder is not included on the police website’s crime statistics page, which has data going back to 2008.
28 Nov 2017, 9:00 AM
Nooshin Washeed was 14 when she first heard about murder in the Maldives: a secretary found dead in a bathroom with multiple stab wounds at the Chamber of Commerce. It was 2001. The victim was Azleena Nafees, she was 27. Nooshin recalls how shocked and scared people were over her death. It was the talk of Maldives, which for decades has marketed itself to the rest of the world as a tropical paradise. “Yet today,” says Nooshin, “murder has become extremely normalised [in the country] and hardly anyone remembers the victims’ names.”
Nooshin, now 30, is co-creator of the only website documenting murder in the Maldives. It was sparked by a discussion about Azleena’s killing. She teamed up with Shahee Ilyas to set up mvmurders.com in 2013. It was, Nooshin says, a way “for us to point out that something has gone very wrong in our society and also a way for us to commemorate the victims.”
But there are challenges.
“There are no official data or crime statistics available to the public so I have to use information from open sources such as online newspapers,” she says. “This means there is always the likelihood of errors in reporting, and there is no way of verifying the information. Another is that we are not paid for this work, we have to find time around our schedules to keep everything up and running.”
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