Officials charged over drug kingpin escape

Two high ranking former officials have been charged with misuse of authority, three years after an investigation revealed their involvement in letting a high profile drug trafficker leave the country illegally.

A spokesman from the Prosecutor General’s office told media on Thursday that a case against former prisons commissioner, Moosa Azim, and former deputy home affairs minister, Mohamed Hanim, had been forwarded to the criminal court.

Ibrahim Shafaz Abdul Razzak, the leader of a nation-wide drug network, was serving an 18-year jail sentence when on February 5, 2014, he was allowed to go to Sri lanka on medical leave. Shafaz asked the high court to review the case after reaching Sri Lanka.

He was caught in Colombo three months later and brought back to Male, where he resumed his sentence for eight more months. But the high court overturned his sentence in 2015 and freed him, citing insufficient and illegally obtained evidence.

The investigation by the Anti-Corruption Commission revealed that Hanim paid a personal visit to a doctor’s home to obtain a signature confirming that Shafaz required urgent medical care abroad.

Hanim, who is now a deputy environment minister, oversaw the illegal preparation of Shafaz’s travel documents and allowed him to leave the country without obtaining formal approval from the medical board at Maldives Correctional Service (MCS).

It was also revealed that Azim had lobbied the MCS medical board to approve Shafaz’s release, despite knowing his paperwork was incomplete.

In addition to Hanim and Azim, the ACC recommended corruption charges be filed against two members of the medical board, a technical officer at Indira Gandhi Memorial Hospital and an MCS employee.

The PG decided not to press charges against the four.

Photo: sun.mv