News Desk
Male’ — It’s Thursday night again — the night the capital’s elite slip into rooftop apartments and behind closed doors, where the music throbs, the pills trade hands, and secrets stay sealed. It’s the city’s unspoken ritual.
But this Thursday carries a different weight.
Because it’s been a week since a 21-year-old woman fell from the ninth floor of a quiet residential block — not the scene of the party, but the place where the night spiraled into darkness. The revelry had started elsewhere, in a building co-owned by the Transport Minister’s family. But it ended here, violently.
She’s still in critical condition. And the city is still asking how it all went so wrong.
A week since drugs, sex, and silence collided into a scandal now threatening to blow the lid off the capital’s privileged playgrounds.
What was once just another Thursday night for the well-connected is now under a microscope. And what happened last Friday is refusing to be buried.
The scene: A party at a building co-owned by none other than Transport Minister Mohamed Ameen. The hour: just past mid night, April 18.
CCTV footage tells a silent, haunting story — two figures, barefoot and stumbling, moving through stairwells. She’s 21. So is he: Raudh Ahmed Zilal, a name that would only come out after days of public pressure.
At one point, on the seventh floor landing, they have sex. And then — she’s gone. Then, a sound. Not a scream — a crash.
It would be nearly three hours before anyone found her, lying motionless on the roof of a nearby warehouse. Alive. Awake. Barely.
Raudh didn’t call for help. CCTV shows he roamed the floors, shirtless and frantic, shouting a name — before disappearing. By the time paramedics arrived, it was two and half hours since and he was long gone.
The police’s first press briefing said next to nothing — just her name and age. Not his. Not anyone else’s. It was enough to spark outrage, especially from women’s rights groups and online activists. The question echoed across social media: Why is only the victim being named?
Only after mass protests, led mostly by Gen Z demonstrators outside police sub HQ, did the floodgates crack open. Names. Photos. Faces. Connections.
Raudh Zilal: brother of Daud Zilal, a recently suspended senior media advisor in the President’s Office. Kins of ex-MNDF brass.
Izdian Maumoon: fired only Thursday, also from the President’s Office.
Another attendee? The son of an Additional Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
It’s a who’s-who of the politically adjacent. A fraternity of unspoken immunity.
“This Smells Like a Double Standard”
That’s how 23-year-old protester Aishath Zara put it. Her sign read: No Cover-Ups, Just Truth. Her voice joined hundreds: Why was only she tested for drugs? Why are we still waiting for answers?
An Addu-boy, MP Ahmed Azaan — never shy about confronting — is calling for a full-blown parliamentary inquiry. Even the ruling MDP has joined the chorus, demanding to know why basic forensic steps, like semen testing, haven’t been taken in what may amount to a case of sexual assault.
President Muizzu Speaks — But it is not too late.
The President took to Twitter, pledging that no one — “regardless of account, lineage, position, or friendship” — would be shielded. But his words face a wall of public skepticism.
Because the building? Owned by the Transport Minister.
The suspects? Tied to his family.
The silence? Deafening.
The delay? A week of whispers, denials, and a police force that seemed to stall — until public fury forced their hand.
And the videos keep coming. New clips show some of the police-named suspects guzzling vodka and indulging in vice — all while clinging to their government posts. The setting? A sleek suite, likely in Bangkok. There’s no hiding the lifestyle, and no denying the contrast: the privileged float above it all, while the rest drown in a system built to sink them.
In Malé, this isn’t just a one-off. It’s a pattern. Parties. Drugs. Elites. Impunity. The Islamic Republic’s stance on drugs is famously strict — in law. But in private? On roof tops? In Safaris at Hulhumale’ harbour? In penthouses and family-owned flats? It’s a different story.
“This is bigger than one fall,” a Malé-based sociologist noted..
And while that culture remains intact, a young woman fights for her life. She — a symbol of a generation caught between privilege and neglect, where connections define worth, and the rest are left to survive the fallout.
The question now isn’t what happened. It’s whether the Maldives will keep pretending it didn’t.
Senior Official Suspended as Police Probe Deepens into Drug Party and Rooftop Fall
