Mariyam
Manike
Mariyam
Manike
Age: 44
Evan Naseem’s mother, Mariyam Manike (44) was arrested on the 12th of September 2004 when the police clamped down on the demonstrations that were held to mark the first anniversary of the death of her son in prison. Between 4:30pm and 5:00pm two lorry loads of security personnel barged into her house to arrest her. One member of the group, private Sankar, started beating her with a broomstick inside her own home and only stopped when another security officer pulled him away. Once inside the police station she was blindfolded and kicked repeatedly. Most of the blows were aimed at her genitals. When she started bleeding, the police officers cuffed her hands and her legs and threw her on the floor.
After a few hours when she asked to go to the toilet the officers uncuffed her legs and a female officer accompanied her. On the way to the toilet male officers kept calling to her to lift her feet so that she would not stumble and laughed when she raised her legs. The accompanying officer shouted very loudly at somebody to stop the beating when Mariyam Manike was hit very hard on the head while she was on the way to the toilet. In the toilet Mariyam Manike pulled her underwear down and the officer helped her to sit down. Before sitting down she asked the officer to tell her whether there was any blood in her underwear. When the officer said no, she sat down and urinated and washed herself with the help of the officer. On the way back from the toilet the officer told her not to say anything and keep very quiet as the male officers might beat her again if they heard her. Soon after a male officer came and offered her food, which she refused to eat.
After some time the female officer came back again and took her outside and sat her down against a wall. She counted twelve people there as she could see a little bit from underneath the blindfold. They told her that by coincidence she had got the same cuffs that were used on her dead son Evan Naseem. The also said that they were going to take her to the “range” where Evan was killed and kill her the same way. When it started to rain, one of them dragged her under the shelter of the roof.
In the middle of the night Mariyam Manike was, along with many others taken to the National Security Service training island of Girifushi. They arrived in Girifushi around 4 o’clock in the morning and were ordered to sit on chairs. According to Mariyam Manike she was very cold and shivering a lot by then due to the rain and wind on the boat. On her left sat Shaaz Waleed (another detainee) and although the person to her right told her name she could not remember the name any more. Soon afterwards she was given some rice, mashuni (a mixture of fish and desiccated coconut), a bit of lentil curry, two rotis and an egg. She gave everything apart from the egg away saying that she could not eat the rest while her hands were cuffed. She could not drink the tea they offered either because of the bad smell coming from the milk in the tea. Once she finished eating the egg she was allowed to lie down in front of the chairs. Soon afterwards they removed her blindfolds. According to Mariyam Manike, the first person she saw when the blindfolds were taken off was Mr. Abdul Jaleel (another person arrested following the demonstration).
After a while a female officer took Mariyam Manike and two other female detainees into a barrack intended for male recruits which had been cleared. They were given a dirty mattress each and allowed to sleep. Mariyam Manike woke up around 4 o’clock in the afternoon. The three detainees were given a handful of rice and some pumpkin curry when they told the female officer that they were hungry.
A doctor came and gave her a tablet when she complained about the pain in her genitals. When she took the tablet she started bleeding profusely. Although she was given sanitary towels she was not given a change of clothing till she was transferred to Dhoonidhoo Detention Centre four days later.
In Dhoonidhoo she was put into a small cell. During the last twenty odd days of a total of 57 days of her detention in Dhoonidhoo, the authorities opened her cell door every day for about an hour. She was not allowed access to a lawyer and was allowed to see her family only once.
During the detention, she was interrogated four times. Each time she was taken out for interrogation she had to confront the killers of her son, who sometimes called her names. According to Mariyam Manike, she lost strength and started shivering every time she saw them and could not speak for a while afterwards. In the interrogation, the police asked whether she knew who financed the Maldivian Democratic Party and also asked whether she had made any contact with Amnesty International.
She met the Amnesty International delegation and the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation when they visited the Maldives to meet those detained following the September 2004 demonstrations.
Charges against her and the others arrested following the demonstration were dropped by the president on the 31st of December 2004 as a sign of goodwill following the tsunami disaster a few days earlier. Mariyam Manike heard the news on national television and has not received any written notification of this as yet.