Thinadhoo mayor Saud given until Nov 10 to appoint a lawyer

Thinadhoo City Mayor Saud Ali has been given one last chance to appoint a lawyer in the case against him over allegations of artificially inflating the size of its residential population in order to enable the island to be granted city status in 2023.

Saud has been charged with knowingly providing a false document and providing false information to an official institution. He faces two years in prison if convicted of the charges.

The first pretrial hearing in the case was held by the Criminal Court on October 5, and a second one was scheduled for October 29 but was cancelled after Saud failed to show up.

Sunday’s hearing was aired live via the Criminal Court’s YouTube channel.

At the hearing, Saud told Judge Ahmed Shafiu he received the latest paperwork related to the case upon arriving at court on Sunday, and needs more time to review the documents.

He added that he has also not yet been able to appoint a lawyer, and asked for more time.

But Shafiu said Saud has already been given 25 days to appoint one.

He said that Saud was given 10 days to appoint a lawyer on October 5, and more time again ahead of a hearing scheduled on October 19, which was cancelled when he asked for more time to appoint a lawyer.

He also noted that some one else had picked up Saud’s phone when the court called just hours ahead of his October 29 hearing.

Saud responded that he had been attending an official meeting when the call came in.

Shafiu told Saud that he needs to give prior notice to the court if he is unable to attend a hearing.

The prosecution did not object to Saud’s request for more time to appoint a lawyer, stating that they had no objections to leaving the decision to the discretion to the judge.

Shafiu decided that Saud has been given enough time to appoint a lawyer, and gave him one last chance to appoint one by the next hearing which he said will he held on November 10.

Thinadhoo was designated as a city on August 30, 2023 by then-president Ibrahim Mohamed Solih during the 2023 presidential campaign. The incumbent administration decided it would not revise the decision.

But a year later, allegations emerged that that the actual population of Thinadhoo is under 10,000 people – which is the legal requirement for an island to be designated a city.

The allegations stem from discrepancies in the population list maintained by the Thinadhoo Council and the Department of National Registration (DNR), with the latter declaring the population of Thinadhoo as 7,924, while the former places the population at 10,150.

The Thinadhoo Council has been accused of artificially boosting the population by including the names of at least 115 deceased individuals as well as people who had removed themselves from the island’s registry decades back to the list.

Saud, who is at the center of these allegation, has previously denied the claims, maintaining that Thinadhoo received city status in accordance with the law.

He described the case against him as politically-motivated.