Mohamed Shafi, a Muslim doctor was falsely accused of secretly sterilising Buddhist women in Sri Lanka and arrested on May 24 over claims he had carried out the illegal sterilisations of thousands of Sinhalese women.

He is still in detention weeks after his arrest, despite investigators says he was framed but court documents seen by AFP show investigators are adamant he was set up.

Communal tensions in Sri Lanka are at boiling point since the Easter Sunday (April 21) suicide bombings by Islamist militants of churches and hotels, which has caused 258 dead and hundreds wounded. From then the pressure has mounted on Sri Lankas Muslims, who make up about 10 percent of the islands 21 million population.

Shafi was arrested after a Sinhalese-language daily published unsorted allegation that he had sterilised 4,000 women from the Buddhist-majority population. The allegations also tied him to membership of the Islamic group blamed for the Easter bombings.

Other media accused Shafi of performing 8,000 caesarian section surgeries and secretly carrying out sterilisations only on Sinhala Buddhist women.

The Criminal Investigations Department (CID) told a court that they found no evidence to support the allegations against Shafi. The CID concluded a 210-page report stating that there is no justification for the arrest of Dr. Shafi. The CID also told the court that Deputy Inspector General of Police Kithsiri Jayalath, chief in Shafis home region of Kurunegala, has fabricated evidence and fed the allegations to the Sinhalese newspaper.

Shafi, is being held under emergency laws and is still behind bars, trying calls for his release. Few rigid Buddhist monks have interfered into the issue and have demanded for the "stoning to death" of the renowned surgeon.

A campaign of "hate" is now in full swing, lawmaker and Sri Lanka Muslim Congress leader Rauff Hakeem told AFP that there had been a build-up of a story against Muslims for more than a century in the country, based on business rivalry, jealousy.

Muslim leaders have urged their community to look within for ways to reduce the communal tensions. Also, Hakeem said that Muslim women covering their face were a new phenomenon in Sri Lanka that had deepened suspicions among other communities. Islamic clerics have approved government moves to ban full face covering, including the niqab, for women.