Mystery of sunken foreign fishing vessel deepens

The discovery of the blackened and charred remains of a foreign fishing vessel, found floating in the lagoon of Male harbor area behind Atolhuvehi Detention Centre, deepened when the sole surviving crew member started babbling in an unknown language upon awaking from a coma. When the foreign fishing vessel was first found by another local fishing vessel, there had been substantial evidence that the sunken boat had suffered through a lot before going down. Maldives Police Service immediately released a statement saying that they had no idea where the boat had come from and that it had been in first class condition when they had released it after arresting it two days earlier on charges of loitering around suspiciously with intent to look suspicious.

The Maldives Democratic Party immediately called on the Maldives Government to send the remains of the boat to Sri Lanka for a postmortem but their pleas have so far been ignored by the Government. Acting President of MDP, Zaki, called the act ‘politically motivated’ and a few seconds later asked: “What boat?”

According to the ‘experts’ and ‘analysts’ at Dhivehi Observer (meaning: Sappe and Sappe) the government was afraid that an autopsy would reveal that the Maldives Police had attacked and sunk the boat. A spokesperson for the government has however said that the reason why the ship had gone down was readily apparent and so there was no need for an autopsy and has called for an immediate burial. The government even requested the Indian military to send a fighter jet to Maldives in an effort to locate any relatives that might have been loitering around nearby but the search proved futile.

Earlier reports had been mixed up and it appears now that the rumors that a tiger had been found on the boat are unfounded. Using sign language, the surviving crew member was able to piece together a story for the Police that they are having a hard time believing. “Maybe we just aren’t very good at charades,” said an official who had been at the scene of the interrogation.

According to the surviving crew member, the fishing vessel had been hunting tuna in Maldives territorial waters when they had spied an especially huge Tuna. Because the sharpshooter of the foreign vessel was slightly cross-eyed the initial two shots had missed the Tuna and it had turned tail to escape. They had been pursuing the faster Tuna when a huge gray boat had appeared with guns blazing and blown the hapless vessel out of the water into smithereens. The last crew member had jumped overboard to escape and said he couldn’t recall anymore and to come back later when he was feeling less human.

The Maldives Police have said that they are investigating the case and that just like every other case they had ever worked on, the investigation will never be concluded.

Information Ministry not satisfied with J-Sat porn

By Ahmed Satellite, reporting while doing it!

The Ministry of Information has slapped local cable operator company, J-Sat, with a Rf 2,500 fine for broadcasting images that the Ministry deemed pornographic yet ‘unsatisfying’. This has led to a war of words between the two, with the cable operator now demanding a guideline defining how much porn they are allowed to air per week and at what times.

According to Mini Van News the “fine relates to a scene from a film shown on Italian channel, Rai International after midnight in April, in which a woman appears topless.” Officials at the Ministry of Information were outraged that they had not been notified of it and had missed it completely since they were all asleep at that time. But some locals who been up watching the channel at that time disagreed with the claim of the woman being 'topless' and said the woman "definitely had a top and made sure everyone got a good look at it by wearing nothing!" They weren't too sure about the face though.

Information Minister Mohamed Nasheed had to later download the movie from RapidShare to confirm whether the movie and the scene in question should be considered pornographic. He later posted a review of the movie on his personal website blog (www.mnasheed.com) calling the scene “titillating, but ultimately unsatisfying”.

J-Sat General Manager, Ibrahim Nasheed, tried to play down the incident and said that the scene “wasn’t in a sexual context… [and] we have not received any complaints from customers regarding the size of the breasts shown and the duration.” He also later added: “Maldivians generally do not watch this channel! The audience is generally Italian, French and Spanish workers in the Maldives. But now most Maldivians who subscribe with us have vowed to make it a point of watching the channel all through the night. And new subscribers are applying every day.”

Mohamed Arif, Assistant Director in the Information Ministry, said the Ministry has received “four or five complaints from Maldivians… of pornography being shown after midnight.” But the J-Sat General Manager disputed the claim and said that the Ministry had distorted the facts and in fact the real quote was: “four or five complaints from Maldivians, of pornography being shown after midnight while they had been sleeping and so having missed it!”

Meanwhile, the amount of people subscribing to J-Sat cable has doubled.

Funny Caption Contest #3

PHOTO #3


As lazy as we know our readers to be, they have on occasion managed to come through for us when it comes to coming up with funny captions to the pix that our readers send us. So get your brain in gear and send in your witty captions to this picture. There's plenty prizes for everyone so don't start chanting for our resignations just yet.

Funny Caption Contest #2 Winners

Well, the votes are in and here it's time to announce the winners of the second Bakhabaru Funny Caption Contest.

The runner up is...

"adam: Get your mind out of the gutter." - by Pissed at adam the pervert

And the winner is... (drumroll, please)

"Too late, the officials from The Gate realized that the front of the skirt was not the best place to splash their corporate name on!" - by Vizaard


Congratulations to all both the winners. May you have the chance to win something cool at least once in your life.

Also at this time I would like to ask your opinion about something (although given the number of comments we got for the last post I wonder if you people even know how to comment) that a Bakhabaru reader told one of our contributors. The reader was of the opinion that a lot of our readers were of the opinion that the Bakhabaru articles were too long. She said that it would better if it were kept very short. What do you think?

Broken News: Maldives Police outright refusing to do autopsy on Ismailbe

Ahmed Satellite, reporting to you miles away from the action

Bakhabaru has just suddenly, for no apparent reason, found out that the Maldives Police Service are steadfastly refusing to do an autopsy on 84-year-old Ismailbe despite mounting pressure from the opposition party and Maldivian Demi-god, Sappe, who have repeatedly called for one to find out the 'real' reason why Ismailbe was arrested by the Police a few days ago. Ismailbe is, according to Mini Van News “one of the opposition’s oldest and most enthusiastic supporters” and was “arrested for distributing leaflets about the death of Hussein Salah”. Although Bakhabaru reporters have been able to confirm the elderly status of Ismailbe, they have failed miserably to confirm whether he was, in fact, an ‘enthusiastic supporter’.

“He is enthusiastic, I’ll give him that,” said one of the officers assigned to him to make sure he did not make a sudden break for an exit when no one was looking. Despite his age, Ismail’s reputation of popping up inside MDP offices 10 times a day without having entered through the door have given the officers some cause for concern. “Give him a small yellow flag to wave and then we can turn off the fan in here! Now, that’s what I call enthusiastic!”

When Acting President of MDP, Zaki, heard about the news he promptly fainted but recovered half an hour later to say that the arrest was “politically motivated” and that “Ismailbe, whoever the heck he is, is an inspiration!” Zaki later vowed that he had been practically bowled over by Ismailbe’s fashion sense.

“If I looked half as good as he does in a shiny yellow shirt, I’d die a happy man!” gushed Zaki. “In fact I think I will go buy a skullcap now! Toodles!”

There is mixed feelings on the streets about performing an autopsy on Ismailbe to find out once and for all why he had been arrested. The Police are keeping their mouths shut, saying that they can reveal nothing while the case was being investigated. This has led to much speculation about the arrest. Maldivian Demi-God Sappe was the first to call for an autopsy and the faithful in MDP had shortly echoed their mini-deity’s request. A website requesting for an autopsy has now been registered at www.fryismailbe.com

A local man on the street had this to say: “I don’t think an autopsy will do any good in this case. They will never be able to find out why he had been arrested, but it would be helpful in finding out how it had happened.”

Another man was more confident. “The government will never do an autopsy!” he said. “They are afraid that it will prove that it was the Maldivian Police who had arrested him.”

Yet another man was strangely surprised by the question and said: “I bet all the autopsy will reveal is that it was the autopsy itself that had killed him!”

Demi-God Sappe had shortly after the arrest, released a ‘confession’ by a ‘Police officer’ on his website, which if proven to be authentic, could finally reveal the truth. The so-called ‘confession’ was apparently written by a Police Officer who had been present when Ismailbe was brought into the Station.

“Despite Ismailbe’s repeated admission that it was him who had been handing out MDP leaflets, the Police officers finally managed to wrestle a confession out of him,” the statement read. “He kept on admitting it but the combined interrogative forces of the Police were no match for the poor defenceless and deaf Ismailbe and eventually the Police got the confession they wanted. However due to a confusion of orders within the Police, the page with the confession was dumped into the sea and Ismailbe ended up in a filing cabinet.”

Police Commissioner Adam Zahir wasn’t amused by the ‘false rumours’ that was being spread by the opposition about how the Police was torturing Ismailbe while he was in custody.

“If anyone is being tortured, it’s us!” bellowed Adam Zahir. “You think it’s easy keeping an 80 plus old man in custody? For one thing we haven’t even been able to get any answers from him on account of him not being able to hear what we are asking him. As for torture, that’s just a silly rumour being spread by the opposition to tarnish the good name of the Po… –yes, what? The blood on my uniform? Oh, I shaved myself cutting this morning. I mean, I cut myself shaving. Yes I tend to bleed rather profusely. Sensitive skin, you know. Anyway, Sappe and the MDP can shout all they want but we will never find out anything by performing an autopussy on Ismailbe. He is too tough a character for that. In fact we have no choice but to resort to anthropomancy to find out anything useful from him since all our regular methods of interrogation have failed so far with him.”

During the exclusive interview with Bakhabaru reporters, Adam Zahir took the Bakhabaru team on a small tour of the Maldives Police Service buildings in order to satisfy Bakhabaru team’s curiosity and to prove that the Police did not use torture and other despicable methods to get confessions from criminals or anyone else unfortunate enough to get caught.

“It’s an image thing. We have to show the world that we do it by the book,” he said, diplomatically refraining to mention which book he was doing it by. “See, we now employ and teach 3 rather effective methods of interrogation to officers. And these have proven to be 100 percent effective so far. First there is the Direct Method. In the Direct Method you restrain your perp inside a small dimly lit room and keep him there for a day. On the second day you send an officer to question him. The question is simple: ‘It was you who did, wasn’t it? Admit it!’ If the perp doesn’t respond with a correct answer (i.e. Yes! It was me!) we keep him there for another day and then ask him again the following day. And so on and on. That’s the direct method. Then there is the Subtle Method. The Subtle Method is similar to the Direct Method except for the question. The question used in the Subtle Method is: ‘Are you sure it wasn’t you who did it?’ Then there is the Persistent Method. In that method we get officers to take shifts and keep asking the perp the same question over and over again, day in day out, until the perp responds with the correct answer. The question used is: ‘We know you did it, we have several witnesses who will testify. Now are you going to confess?’ In some extreme cases it has taken a week for the perp to finally confess but that’s rare. However, there is one shortcoming to these methods but we choose to ignore it most of the time. In almost all cases once the perp has confessed we found they had a peculiar tendency of asking a question directly after.”

When prompted by Bakhabaru reporters to reveal the peculiar question in er... question, Zahir made a shrugging gesture and said: “I don’t know why, but right after maniacally screaming ‘YES! I did it! It was me that did it!’ they would ask ‘So could you please tell me what it was that I did?’