Download PDF of Maldives' government's findings in the investigation of the torture and murder of Hassan Evan Naseem in Maafushi prison on 19 September 2003. This report is in English language.
Download PDF of Maldives' government's findings in the investigation of the torture and murder of Hassan Evan Naseem in Maafushi prison on 19 September 2003. This report is in Maldives' native Dhivehi language.
Download PDF of Maldives' government's findings in the investigation of the fatal shootings at Maafushi prison that killed some inmates who protested following the torture and death of Hassan Evan Naseem the day before. This report is in Maldives' native Dhivehi language.
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By Naeem Ibrahim (Naimbe)
Is there a good, ideal age to die? A nice, die-able age? Some people live long lives. Others die as infants. Or as young adults. But the little boy who dies as a toddler and the grandma who dies at a hundred are both forgotten soon, as if they never lived. Swallowed by the immensity of time, a puff of air in a snap of a finger. Some people do a lot in their lifetime. Others do their work in death. Stories of some lives mean so much for some people and countries. Stories of some deaths mean even more.
I died on this day (19 September 2003), twenty years ago, of a rib in my chest snapping and impaling through my lungs after twelve prison guards took turns beating me throughout the night, my body hanging down with handcuffs around my wrists. I was nineteen. Clinton was a year younger. He died a day later with a bullet in his head when guards opened fire after riots broke out among inmates when they heard of my death. He was one of nineteen inmates shot.
Earlier that day Mamma was told to go to the hospital. I am the second of five children she had. Nurses held a cover over my body. But she suddenly plucked off the cover. Bellowed frantically. The nurses tried to console her. She went berserk. Tried to touch my ears to remove the sand. Looked at my eyes - swollen, black and soiled. My face, discoloured with patches of bluish and purple hues. Puffy and distorted.
“They killed my son!”, Mamma cried hysterically. Nurses surrounded her. They held her down and tried to give her an injection. She freed herself & ran outside. “Get people out on the streets. Tell them – tell them, they murdered my son in the jail,” she kept screaming at the top of her voice.
My anger, hatred, resentment, and everything that weighed me down are long gone now. I’ve become boundless. Formless. Like a photon of light. But more alive than ever before. Alive in the realization that with a flip of that random coin in the great cosmos fate chose me among that elite squad of martyrs for a cause far bigger than my mortal existence.
In life, I was an anonymous grade-seven dropout - a glue-sniffing kid from a broken family - sometimes high on street cocaine. In death, everyone knows me. Remembers me. My name is on newspapers, magazines and books lining the shelves of even the biggest libraries in the world. Maybe people talk about this ‘One Day’ in my death the way they talk about the ‘One Day’ in the life of a fictional character - another Ivan - in a Soviet Gulag that ultimately led to the downfall of the world superpower.
My death changed the course of my nation. My country will never be the same again.
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