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Police in the Maldives have raided the offices of a critical news outlet, seized journalists’ equipment, and barred its editors from leaving the country after it published a documentary alleging that President Mohamed Muizzu had an affair with a former aide.

Getting into it: The documentary, titled “Aisha,” was posted on March 28 by Adhadhu Online (an opposition-aligned outlet) and featured an anonymized interview with a woman who said she was a 22-year-old single mother and had a sexual relationship with Muizzu while working as an administrator at the President’s Office. Muizzu is 47, married, and a father of three. He denied the allegations.

The documentary was released days before a constitutional referendum on April 4 that delivered a rebuke to Muizzu, with 69% of voters rejecting his proposal to align presidential and parliamentary election cycles. The raid came on April 27 (the same day an Adhadhu journalist publicly questioned Muizzu about the allegations at a televised press conference). According to the Maldives Journalists Association, Muizzu then asked authorities to launch an investigation and take “stringent legal action” against the documentary’s production team.

Police executed the raid using a warrant citing “qazf” (the Islamic penal code offense of falsely accusing someone of adultery, which carries a prison sentence of one year and seven months and can also include 80 lashes). Officers seized laptops, hard drives, and storage devices from journalists, marketing staff, and administrators.

Adhadhu’s CEO Hussain Fiyaz Moosa and managing editor Hassan Mohamed also had their passports confiscated and were placed under a three-month travel ban, with police intelligence alleging they were planning to flee the country (a claim Fiyaz called baseless, noting he had just returned from an overseas trip shortly before the raid).

“This is being done by the police, with the influence of the government, on the government’s order, to directly stop our work,” Fiyaz told Al Jazeera. The Committee to Protect Journalists called the raid “an attempt to criminalise investigative journalism under the guise of religious and national interests,” while the Maldives Journalists Association said the government was “crossing a clear red line.”

This all comes as the Maldives passed a widely criticized media law last September establishing a government-stacked commission with the power to fine, suspend, and shut down outlets.