Former Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed was taken back to prison on Sunday after two months of house arrest. Police in the capital Male have forcibly taken Mohamed Nasheed, the country's first democratically elected president, to the high security Maafushi prison on Sunday night, according to PTI.
Forty-eight-year-old Nasheed's Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) strongly condemned his arrest, calling it "arbitrary and illegal." It claimed that the government has commuted his 13-year prison sentence to house arrest on media grounds, according to Haveeru.
"Nasheed's transfer back to jail is in clear breach of the Maldives' constitution, which provides no provision for reversing a commutation of a sentence," the MDP said, according to AFP.
"The retraction of permanent commutation of Nasheed's sentence to house arrest and his transfer back to the country's maximum security jail in Maafushi island is illegal," MDP spokesperson Hamid Abdul Ghafoor said, according to Associated Press.
Maldivian government, however, denied MDP's claim regarding commutation of Nasheed's remaining prison term to house arrest.
"The Maldives Correctional Service hasn't issued any such document changing the Criminal Court's ruling on Nasheed, that is, 13 years in prison," presidential spokesperson Ibrahim Muaz Ali said, according to BBC.
The former Maldivian president was arrested in March this year and sentenced to 13 years in prison after being found guilty of orchestrating the arbitrary detention of Chief Criminal Judge Abdulla Mohamed.
