Michael Lord-Castle and the GPC

Lord-Castle and four of his associates were deported from Maldives and banned for life. He indicated that several of the GPC personnel involved were citizens of Qatar. Others were from Great Britain.

However the mystery of GPC team’s purpose in travelling to Maldives deepened when he revealed that MDP leader, Zaki, had appealed to him to retract a statement given to police that the MDP had invited them. That statement is now part of the evidence submitted to the court trying Zaki on charges of sedition and creating disharmony. Lord-Castle had previously stated in the Maldives media that his statement was deliberately falsified and he signed it with the name “Donald Duck”, the Walt Disney comic cartoon character, as a means of undermining the statement’s credibility.

When pressed about the government’s assertion that the GPC had been sent by Nirj Deva, the Sri Lanka born British member of the European Parliament, he said this was not true either. But he revealed that Nirj Deva had introduced the GPC to the MDP – but only at a party in Colombo some five years ago, a social event attended by officials of the British High Commission and businessmen based in Sri Lanka.