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COLOMBO: Maldives police said Thursday they had arrested a local man described by the United States as a recruiter of fighters for the Daesh group in Syria and Afghanistan.
The man, identified as Mohamed Ameen, 35, was arrested on Wednesday night under new anti-terror laws, police said adding he was suspected of spreading an “extremist ideology” in the Indian Ocean archipelago.
Police did not give further details of the arrest which followed the US designating him last month as a foreign terrorist leader of Daesh-Khorasan which was reportedly active in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Local media reports said Ameen had been initially sending Maldivians to Syria, but was now recruiting them to be deployed in Afghanistan.
Ameen was identified by a Maldivian government panel last month as the leader of a local extremist outfit affiliated to Daesh.
He was also suspected of being involved in a crude explosion using a cooking gas cylinder at Sultan Park in the capital Male in September 2007 in which a dozen tourists suffered minor injuries.
In June, the nation of 340,000 Sunni Muslims called for international help to rehabilitate up to 160 of its nationals thought to be held in Syrian detention camps after the defeat of Daesh.
Speaker Mohamed Nasheed said during a visit to the Sri Lankan capital that they kept a close tab on citizens who had joined the militant group, but the Maldives was not ready to accept them back without an internationally supervised reintegration program.
Nasheed also said the Maldivian authorities were keeping a close watch on any attempt to radicalize its population, which practices a liberal form of Islam — and relies heavily on luxury tourism.