Body found close to last seen area: Why was search delayed?

Police first published detailed information about missing Mohamed Azhan a week after he had gone missing on 18 September. At the time police said that the 27-year-old man was known to be staying in a guesthouse in Hulhumale phase one and that the area where he was last seen was near the Red Bull Stadium in phase one.

A week later on Sunday, the body of a man believed to be Azhan was found. The body was found in the wooded area on the west side of Nirolhu Magu, in front of the water theme park, an incomplete construction project.

That part of the road is on the highway leading to the Sinamale' Bridge.

Azhan's body was found approximately 300 feet away from the red bull ground where he was last seen alive.

Public discontent about how the police have been incompetent in searching for the missing person around such a small radius of where he was last seen is spreading

Normally if a person goes missing from an island, the first search will be carried out in the woodlands and uninhabited houses in the island. The public is voicing that the wooded area near the Red Bull park was the first place police should have searched.

According to public comments, if there are vacant wooded areas nearby where a missing person is last seen, the police investigation should have begun with exploring that venue. The questions were also posed to the police during the press conference held on Sunday night at the scene of the body's discovery.

Superintendent Hassan Saeed, head of the Serious and Organised Crime Department, responded to the questions saying that the police had searched the Red Bull park and the adjacent water theme park grounds. However, he said that the police had received no information that warranted a search of the other side.

He also said that police had searched the wooded area in front of the water theme park on Sunday, since the CCTV footage did not show Azhan leave the area.

The police superintendent said that after they had confirmed Azhan had not left Hulhumale, they decided to do a more thorough search of the area he was last seen in again, a week after the man had gone missing.

This prolonged police search had triggered the public discontent on the matter and public comments regarding the matter have flooded social media platforms.

“Not having searched a grassy area 200 feet away from where the missing person was last seen is carelessness of the police at extreme," said Ungoofaaru MP Mohamed Waheed.

"The police have not put much attention to this matter. Otherwise, why didn't they search a small area so nearby?," a person wrote on Facebook.

"Until now we’ve always heard about how vigilant the police are, but finding the dead body of a missing person after his body had decomposed to such an extent that his face has become unrecognisable shows police incompetence," another complained.

"To not have located the body by searching the area, this is not the Amazon jungle we’re talking about," another post on social media read

There is no detailed response from the police to the public complaints. However, some former officers said that it is not likely that the police will treat such a serious case so carelessly. If there are concerns of police negligence, they said, it should be filed with the relevant authorities.

A former police officer said that it was unacceptable that the police had assumed Azhan could be elsewhere without first eliminating the possibility he could be nearby and fully searching the area he was last seen in. Since he did not know any further details of the police investigation, he then spoke about the matter generally.

The former officer also said that standards have been set in other countries to investigate the disappearance of a person. He said that the case would be examined at the most normal level first, but if it was suspected to be linked to a death or homicide at a certain point, the level of investigation and the resources used should diversify.

He added that when a person goes missing, there will be policies to follow; the search operation would be carried out in different ways and any location found would be investigated in many ways. He also said that if the number of police officers or resources was limited for the operation, police would reach out to other trained personnel in the field such as fire fighters and the MNDF.

Crimes such as kidnapping in Male have been on the rise recently. Some people allege that the police investigation did not involve searching the public grounds because the police suspected the missing person could have been held hostage somewhere, much like the Rilwan case. Another former police officer said that it was highly unlikely that the police would have proceeded thus.

The second officer noted that when investigating such a case, police will not proceed with their investigations based on something that had happened earlier. 

"But somewhere along the line if the police receive intel that the man has been kidnapped, then the police will further expand their investigations to involve that direction as well," the officer said.

"The police will not assume every missing person is held hostage somewhere, so they will begin search for a missing person by checking specific locations."

The wooded area where the dead body was found is land awarded to the government of Qatar to construct a football stadium. Police have now cordoned off the entire area, and are now investigating for  any further evidence from the crime scene.