Yameen Rasheed, who used his Daily Panic blog to poke fun at politicians, found with stab wounds at his flat in Malé

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

A blogger who frequently satirised the Maldives’ political and religious establishment has been stabbed to death in the capital, the third media figure to be targeted in the Indian ocean archipelago in the past five years.

Yameen Rasheed, 29, was found early on Sunday in the stairwell of his apartment building in Malé with multiple stab wounds to his neck and chest. He died shortly after being taken to hospital, family members said.

His blog, The Daily Panic, had gathered a large following for its droll reporting and biting satire of what Rasheed called “the frequently unsatirisable politics” of the country, home to about 340,000 Sunni Muslims.



An IT professional by trade, Rasheed maintained the blog in his spare time, writing that he aimed to report “the unfiltered truth, the sickening facts, the gruesome details, and – because this is the Maldives – the painfully obvious”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An internet user points to a portrait of Yameen Rasheed on his blog, The Daily Panic. Photograph: Eranga Jayawardena/AP

He was arrested along with scores of others and imprisoned for three weeks in 2015 after taking part in an antigovernment rally in the capital.

His father, Hussain Rasheed, said he learned his son had been hospitalised just before 5am on Sunday morning. “They told me they could not show me the body, but I said was his father, I had the right to see him before it was cleaned up,” he said.

He said a burial ceremony had been held later on Sunday, where friends paid tribute to his “very sweet” son. The family was distressed and “very angry”, he added.

Zaheena Rasheed, a friend and the editor of the Maldives Independent news website, said he had been receiving regular death threats which he was reporting to the police.

“There’s a lot of anger at the police at the moment because he was so vocal about the fact he was being threatened and everyone knew,” she said.

He was often abused for being a “secularist with an agenda”, she said, though his writing focused on social justice, government incompetence, corruption and waste.

“We’ve all had death threats and you don’t take it seriously, but we’ve lost so many people,” she added.

Another journalist and friend, Daniel Bosley, said Rasheed was well known for his sense of humour and sharp opinion writing. “He just wrote so much better than anyone else,” he said.



“He was a reclusive guy, he liked to spend a lot of time on his own reading and writing ... But when you got close to him he was so funny.”

Rasheed has recently returned from London where he had won a prize for an app that helped link citizens and hospitals seeking blood donations.

The blogger had been relentlessly asking questions over the disappearance in August 2014 of Ahmed Rilwan, a journalist with the Minivan News whose whereabouts remain unknown.

“He kept going and going when everyone else was dropping off,” Bosley said.

“I remember him being a little unsettled by the fact that some of the threats [against him] in recent months were no longer anonymous.”

Rasheed had told him he suspected he was being followed and watched, Bosley said.

Another blogger, Ismail Rasheed, also known as Hilath, was stabbed and wounded by an unidentified attacker in 2012. Afrasheem Ali, an MP whose Islamic scholarship had reportedly angered religious hardliners in the country, was murdered the same year.

Marketed internationally as a luxury tourist destination, the Maldives has undergone an unsteady transition towards democracy since 2008, after three decades of autocratic rule.



Political tension has simmered since a 2012 coup ousted the country’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Nasheed, and spiked again in March after an attempt by the opposition to impeach the country’s parliamentary speaker.

The UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, David Kaye, has criticised onerous defamation laws introduced by President Abdulla Yameen, and journalists on the islands have warned of an atmosphere of intimidation.

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Radicalisation has also become a problem in the past decade, with at least 50 Maldivians, and probably many more, thought to be fighting with jihadi groups in the region – potentially one of the highest rates of any country per capita.

Some attribute the flare up of extremist ideology to funding from Saudi Arabia, much of it spent on infrastructure in the developing country, but at least $1m pledged in the past three years for Islamic programmes, schools and new mosques.

Yameen’s office said in a statement that it condemned Rasheed’s murder “in the strongest possible terms”.

It said in a statement: “In his death we have lost a young, energetic, voice full of potential that contributed heavily, and responsibly, to the social and political discourse of our nation.

“He was a socially conscious, civic minded, talented, creative, courageous and impassioned young soul – everything the youth of this nation should aspire to be and more.”



The party of Nasheed, the Maldivian Democratic party (MDP), said the murder of a frequent government critic called for “an immediate, full and transparent investigation ... with the involvement of credible international investigative bodies.

“The MDP strongly believes that the Maldivian Police Service does not possess the capacity, credibility or political impartiality to conduct such a high profile investigation on its own.”

Yameen’s regime has recently arrested the remaining Maldivian opposition leaders who were not already in exile.

Qasim Ibrahim, who ran for president in 2013 and currently heads the Jumhooree party, was one of four signatories to a recent opposition unity deal aimed at toppling Yameen.

Ibrahim was briefly detained and released earlier this month only to be rearrested over the weekend.

A coalition of opposition parties led by Nasheed is positioning to unseat Yameen in presidential polls scheduled for 2018.