Police armed with pickaxes and power tools have destroyed a modern artwork by a celebrated British sculptor in the Maldives, after the outgoing president in the tourist haven declared the installation offensive to Islam.
Abdulla Yameen ordered the sculptures’ demolishing in July, but his ruling was not acted upon until Friday, on the eve of the presidential election which he lost to a liberal candidate.
A series of statues by Jason deCaires Taylor was placed inside a semi-submerged metal cube in July at a resort in the Maldives, an archipelago of 340,000 Sunni Muslims, popular with tourists.
Islam, the official religion in the Maldives, bans the depiction of idols, and the work provoked some criticism from clerics even though the statues have no religious symbols or meaning.