The exiled former president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, withdrew on Friday his candidacy for September\u2019s contentious elections against incumbent Abdulla Yameen who has jailed all his main rivals.<\/p>\n
Nasheed announced his decision after being informed by the national electoral commission that he was disqualified from running in the September 23 vote in the Indian Ocean archipelago nation.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have decided to relinquish my Presidential ticket,\u201d he said on Twitter, calling the electoral commission\u2019s decision — which it says was due to Nasheed\u2019s terrorism conviction \u201cillegal\u201d.<\/p>\n
He added however that his Maldivian Democratic Party would still contest the election and would appoint another candidate in his place.<\/p>\n
Yameen has ruled the Maldives, better known abroad as an up-market tourist destination, with an iron fist since 2013, launching a crackdown on dissent that has seen two of the country\u2019s former leaders put behind bars.<\/p>\n
Nasheed was convicted of terrorism in 2015 in a case widely decried by rights groups as politically motivated, and handed a 13-year jail sentence.<\/p>\n
He was allowed to go to London in 2016 for medical treatment and has remained there in exile since, vowing however to return for the election.<\/p>\n
Among those in jail are Yameen\u2019s half-brother Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, a former strongman who ruled the Sunni Muslim country of 340,000 people for 30 years until 2008.<\/p>\n
He was arrested along with the chief justice and the supreme court justice in February for their alleged role in clearing the way for an impeachment of Yameen.<\/p>\n
Yameen declared a state of emergency which removed parliament\u2019s power to remove him from office.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The exiled former president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, withdrew on Friday his candidacy for September\u2019s contentious elections against incumbent Abdulla Yameen who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35693,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35692"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35694,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35692\/revisions\/35694"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}