NEWS IN BRIEF

Date: 22 February 2015 - 20:18

News ID: ۱۱۲۵۲

Malé, Maldives (Reuters) - Police in Maldives arrested former president Mohamed Nasheed on Sunday after a court said he might flee the country to avoid hearings on terrorism charges, leading to clashes between his supporters and authorities.
Nasheed, Maldives' first democratically elected president, had been facing criminal charges over his order to arrest a top judge in January 2011. Nasheed stepped down in early 2012, saying he had been overthrown in a coup.
Last week the prosecutor-general withdrew the original charges against Nasheed, but issued an arrest warrant on Sunday under new charges of terrorism relating to the same incident of the arrest of the judge four years ago. The first hearing will be on Monday.
Police used teargas to disperse protesters from Nasheed's Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) as he was taken from his home.
"I call on the public to do all that is necessary to stop the harassment meted out to me and other politicians to save Maldives," Nasheed told reporters in Male while being taken to a detention center on a separate island.
Last week Nasheed asked India to intervene in case President Abdulla Yameen, to whom Nasheed lost the last election in 2013, imposed emergency rule.

CANBERRA (PRESS TV) – Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott says his country needs to reconsider its immigration laws in reaction to the deadly siege in Sydney last December.
He made the remarks on Sunday in the city as he released the first report conducted by officials from the federal government and the government of New South Wales into the incident.
"Plainly, the system has let us down,” he said, adding, "This monster should not have been in our community,” referring to the hostage taker identified as Man Haron Monis who held 18 people at gunpoint during a 17-hour siege in Australia’s largest city’s Lindt café on December 15.
The siege ended after Monis was shot and killed. Two of the hostages were also killed.

Authorities say Monis, also known as Mohammad Hassan Manteqi, was an Iranian-born who had escaped to Australia in 1996.
Iran’s police chief Brigadier General Ismail Ahmadi Moqaddam said Tehran had in 2000 asked Australia to extradite Monis on fraud charges, but Canberra failed to do so as there was no extradition treaty between the two countries.
At the time of the siege, the hostage taker was on bail on a charge over the murder of his ex-wife. He had also been charged with dozens of sexual assaults.

CAIRO (PRESS TV) – A court in Egypt has acquitted a former oil minister, who served under ex-dictator Hosni Mubarak, of charges of selling cheap gas to Israel.
The Cairo court exonerated Sameh Fahmi and five other former oil officials in a retrial on Saturday, after they were convicted in 2012 for selling Israel natural gas at below the market price, and were sentenced to between 3 and 15 years in prison.
The defendants had been found guilty of harming the country’s interests by signing a deal to sell gas to Israel for 1.5 dollars per British thermal unit, almost nine times lower than the market price.
The ruling comes as a large number of Mubarak-era officials have recently been cleared in retrials after being initially convicted.
In November last year, an appeals court absolved Mubarak and his Interior Minister Habib al-Adly of charges of killing peaceful protesters during the 2011 revolution, which resulted in Mubarak’s ouster.
The former dictator was also exculpated during the same trial of charges of exporting cheap gas to Israel.
Following the court order, Egyptians took to the streets to protest the ruling.