Maldives Presidential Office via AFP - Getty Images
Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed announces his resignation during a televised press conference.
By msnbc.com news services
Updated at 3:36 a.m. ET
MALE, Maldives -- Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed resigned Tuesday?following weeks of public protests over his controversial order to arrest a senior judge.
In a nationally televised address, Nasheed said his continuing in power would result in his having to use force against his people.
He was expected to?hand over the presidency to his deputy Mohammed Waheed Hassan.
Maldives, an Indian Ocean archipelago known for luxurious resorts for upmarket tourists, has a new democracy after being under autocratic rule for 30 years.?
Earlier Tuesday, Reuters reported that?mutinying police took over the state broadcaster and broadcast an opposition-linked station's calls for people to come on the streets to overthrow Nasheed.
Reuters cited a presidential source as saying?Nasheed was safely inside the headquarters of the Maldives National Defense Force.
Nasheed, a former pro-democracy political prisoner, campaigned successfully for democratic reforms and was elected to office in 2008 in the country's first multiparty election.
The violence on the Indian Ocean archipelago best-known as a beach getaway is the worst in a struggle between Nasheed, widely credited with ushering in full democracy to the archipelago, and former president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, whose 30-year rule was widely seen as autocratic.
Constitutional crisis
Protests began weeks ago after Nasheed ordered the military to arrest the top criminal court judge, whom he accuses of being in the pocket of the former president.
That set off a constitutional crisis that has Nasheed in the unaccustomed position of defending himself of acting like a dictator.
Sinan Hussain / AP
A police officer, in blue, charges soldiers during a clash in Male on Tuesday.
Gayoom's opposition Progressive Party of the Maldives accused the military of firing rubber bullets at protesters and a party spokesman, Mohamed Hussain "Mundhu" Shareef, said "loads of people" were injured. He gave no specifics.
An official close to the president denied the government had used rubber bullets, but confirmed that about three dozen police officers defied orders overnight and smashed up the main rallying point of the ruling Maldivian Democratic Party.
"This follows Gayoom's party calling for the overthrow of the Maldives' first democratically elected government and for citizens to launch jihad against the president," said the official.
The protests, and the scramble for position ahead of next year's presidential election, have seen parties adopting hardline Islamist rhetoric and accusing Nasheed of being anti-Islamic.
On Twitter, opposition-linked groups or individuals have called for Nasheed's impeachment and, in at least one case, beheading under Shariah law.
The trouble has also shown the longstanding rivalry between Gayoom and Nasheed, who was jailed for a combined six years after being arrested 27 times by Gayoom's government while agitating for democracy.
The trouble has been largely invisible to the 900,000 or so well-heeled tourists who come very year to visit desert islands swathed in aquamarine seas, ringed by beaches of icing-sugar sands, would get a hint of that.
'Potentially a tropical Afghanistan'
Most tourists are whisked straight to their island hideaway by seaplane or speedboat, where they are free to drink alcohol and get luxurious spa treatments, insulated from the everyday Maldives, a fully Islamic state where alcohol is outlawed and skimpy beachwear frowned upon.
Maldivian intelligence officers and Western officials say hardline Salafist and Wahabist groups are gaining political ground in the more distant atolls and making a beachhead in Male.
The capital island is home to almost 200,000 of the Maldives' 330,000 people, all Sunni Muslims. It is also home to the majority of the estimated 30,000 people on the islands who are addicted to heroin, according to U.N. estimates.
"It's potentially a tropical Afghanistan. The same forces that gave rise to the Taliban are there -- the drugs, the corruption and the behavior of the political class," a Colombo-based Western ambassador who is responsible for the Maldives told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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