Malé, Maldives –Adhuham Mohamed, suspected of murdering taxi driver Gasim Hassan in 2019 after a mugging attempt, has changed his story and plead guilty a second time in court.
Adhuham is the main suspect in taxi driver Gasim’s brutal murder on December 4, 2019. Gasim was left to die after suffering multiple stab wounds in his arm and neck, according to Police reports.
After Adhuham’s arrest in early 2020, he initially confessed, and entered a plea bargain with the state, but on the date of sentencing, he plead not guilty. However, at the next hearing of this case today, he plead guilty yet again, going into detail how he carried out the heinous crime.
The plea deal is now unavailable to Adhuham, and the state has decided to go ahead with the case using gathered evidence, which includes clothes the suspect was wearing during the murder, in addition to the murder weapon, which was found thrown away around 300 meters from the crime scene.
At today’s hearing, Adhuham stated that he was threatened into denying the charges by some inmates he was imprisoned with at the time, and that he pleads guilty yet again as the threat by other prisoners in now gone.
Answering a question by the judge, he claimed that the other prisoners coerced him into saying that Police offers were threatening him to enter the plea bargain. But this was not true according to Adhuham’s statement today, who say police officers have never done such a thing.
He said today that, while the state claims he attacked Gasim with intent to kill, this is untrue. Adhuham said that his only goal was to steal, but as he was under the influence at the time, he accidentally stabbed the taxi driver in the neck.
After this statement, the judge asked if anyone forced Adhuham into doing drugs that night, to which he replied that he was willingly intoxicated.
After stabbing the driver in the neck, Adhuham exited the taxi, took off his shirt in the shrubbery in front of the halfway house and hid it under some bags. His knife fell into a ground some distance away from the murder site while making his escape. He then contacted a friend and borrowed a shirt, got dressed and went to Male’ on a bus.
At today’s hearing asked Gasim’s family for forgiveness, pleading for leniency in his sentence.
At the time of Adhuham’s arrest last year Prosecutor General Hussain Shameem said PG Office was working closely with Police in this case, and said that even though the suspect has confessed to the crime, Police are collecting all the evidences necessary to tie him to the murder.
Even if he confess in the investigation, the suspect can later retract his confession so the authorities need to be ready and evidence should be rock solid, Shameem added.
This indeed was the case in Gasim’s murder, and Police are now ready to charge him the crime using solid evidence their investigations have uncovered, which includes DNA and fingerprints, in addition to the murder weapon and a bloodstained shirt.
The prosecution and judge agree that witness testimonies are necessary for the case and witnesses will be heard in the next hearing.
