News Desk
MALE’ — They worked in the same hospital. They were having an affair. And when Mary Grace’s husband and his Maldivian lover decided she was standing in the way of their future together, the court found on Monday, they planned her death with the precision of people who knew exactly what substances could kill without leaving obvious traces.
The Criminal Court ruled that Marvin Vargas murdered his wife, Filipino nurse Mary Grace, at their home in October 2021, and that his lover, Haleemath Lamha Abdurrahman, a Maldivian nurse at the same hospital, participated in planning and executing the killing. Both worked at Indira Gandhi Memorial Hospital in Male’.
The verdict against Marvin came first. The court found that his claim Mary Grace had died by her own hand was, in its words, a blatant lie constructed to conceal the crime. A post-mortem examination found a small bone in her neck had been broken, an injury consistent with strangulation. Investigators found that Marvin had searched online for images showing how to apply a chokehold. The injuries on Mary Grace’s neck matched what such a hold would produce. Police said he killed her by striking her head and neck and cutting off her breathing.
Marvin, who converted to Islam while in pre-trial detention and changed his name to Yusuf, had been held in custody throughout the proceedings. Sentencing will be heard on 1 July at his own request.
The ruling against Lamha came the same day. The court found that she did not merely know about the plan. She helped design it.
Deleted messages recovered from Lamha’s phone showed she had instructed Marvin on how to administer injections that could kill or paralyse a person. Those injections, which are not available for use outside hospital settings, were found inside Lamha’s own room. She could not explain why they were there.
The court said the evidence established beyond reasonable doubt that Lamha and Marvin had planned Mary Grace’s death together, motivated by their desire to marry. Mary Grace was the obstacle. The court found that Lamha planned the killing, told Marvin how to carry it out and assisted him in doing so.
Two additional charges against Lamha were also proven. She was found guilty of exercising unauthorised control over property belonging to another person, and of carrying out an act that requires a licence without obtaining one, the latter relating to her possession and apparent use of the restricted hospital injections found in her room.
The case has run for years through the Maldivian court system and has drawn sustained public attention, partly because of its setting inside IGMH, the country’s main public hospital, and partly because of the particular coldness of what the evidence described. Two medical professionals, trained to preserve life, used that training to end it.
Mary Grace came to the Maldives to work. She brought skills the hospital needed and sent money home in the way thousands of Filipino nurses working abroad do. She did not know that the man she was married to was in love with someone else, or that the someone else was in the same building, on the same wards, working the same shifts.
The court has now said both of them killed her. Sentencing for Marvin is set for 1 July. Lamha’s sentence will follow.
