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Reuters has reported President Mohamed Nasheed saying that the arrest of the Chief Judge of Criminal Court Abdulla Mohamed cannot be justified.

The Reuters article entitled ‘Graft, politics, militant Islam shake Indian Ocean island paradise’ says that the President himself is uncomfortable about the whole situation regarding Judge Abdulla, and accepts that it cannot be justified.

The article says, “Taking a page from the book of Gayoom, Nasheed ordered Mohamed’s arrest and defied a Supreme Court release order, sparking more than three weeks of sometimes-violent protests by opposition parties that scented a chance for their own Arab Spring in the Indian Ocean.”

“For god’s sake, I don’t want to arrest anyone. I have no intention of keeping anyone under arrest, and the man is kept very nicely – that’s no justification at all – but it’s not the kind of dump we were kept in,” President Nasheed told Reuters, referring to when he was held imprisoned by the former regime.

The article also says that that while all focus is on the 2013 presidential election, Maldivian intelligence officials and Western officials have indicated that extremist religious groups are gaining political ground all over the country.

“It’s potentially a tropical Afghanistan. The same forces that gave rise to the Taleban are there – the drugs, the corruption and the behavior of the political class,” says Reuters, citing a Colombo-based Western ambassador.

President Nasheed is of the same opinion with regard to the wave of religious conservatism in the country.

“Whatever winds that blow with trade from the Middle East always stop in the Maldives first,” he told Reuters, referring to the conservative influences in the country from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan over the past three decades.

“They’re really quite infiltrated into many, many islands and they have literally taken over our way of life.”