The Criminal Court’s acquittal of Raajje Television journalist Mohamed Wisam on Tuesday is indicative of the charges against the station and a number of its staff is ‘baseless and void of truth’, the station said in a statement. 

Prosecutors raised obstruction charges against Wisam in April 2016 after being arrested the year before while covering a bomb scare in capital city Malé.

“Court’s acquittal after two years shows that there are influential people within the government, who will not hesitate in their pursuit of putting an innocent person through a needless and long-standing trial” the station’s statement said. 

The statement further said that Tuesday’s acquittal proves that the entire proceedings were a facade, and puts the police and prosecutors to ‘shame’. 

The court ruled that the chain of custody had been broken as the video evidence put forth against Wisam failed to show the circumstances under which he was apprehended. 

Further, the video presented – also the one used to fine another member of RaajjeTV’s staff – had shown that Wisam was clearly in the company of other journalists, and therefore the purpose of apprehending him was also ‘unclear’. 

Two other journalists with the station have been fined by MVR 28,800 for the same charges after they were arrest while covering a bomb scare in Malé City, and their cameraman, Adam Zareer, was fined by MVR 3,000 – in what the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) had described as undemocratic and unjust charges.

The station’s chief operating officer, Hussein Fiyaz Moosa, has also been charged with assaulting an officer.