MANAMA: Bahraini authorities are brooking no dissent even after the suppression of a Shiite-led pro-democracy movement, with activists arrested, staff dismissed for strike action and offers of a national dialogue muted.

Two Bahraini Shiite activists detained in the wake of anti-regime protests have died in detention, the Gulf kingdom’s Interior Ministry said Sunday while activists said they died after physical abuse at the hands of security officials.
The ministry statement came a day after authorities arrested and beat a prominent human rights activist and members of his family.

Ali Issa Saqer, 31, died at the hands of prison security guards after “causing chaos in detention,” police said in a statement posted by the Interior Ministry on Twitter.
“Security men had to intervene to restore security … but he resisted, forcing them to engage him, which resulted in him receiving several wounds,” it said. He died in hospital, police said, without specifying whether he was shot or had suffered other injuries.

Police said Saqer was arrested on suspicion of having killed policemen by running them over with a car.
The ministry said another detainee, Zakaraya Rashed Hassan, 40, arrested on April 2 for “inciting hatred against the regime and spreading fabricated news,” had been “found dead” in his prison cell. A post-mortem examination showed sickle cell disease was the cause of death.

Activists believe both men were subjected to physical and mental abuse and might have died as a result, said Nabeel Rajab of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. “We believed they killed them in prison,” Rajab said.
Authorities have also detained and beaten prominent human rights activist Abdulhadi al-Khawaja and two of his sons-in-law, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights said Saturday in a statement.

“They broke the front door to the house and then beat them severely” along with another man, the group said.
“Khawaja was beaten so severely that the blood stain is still visible on the staircase. And when his oldest daughter, Zainab, tried to intervene she was beaten as well.”

Khawaja, 50, is a former Middle East and North Africa director of the Frontline Defenders rights organization. He has also documented human rights abuses in Bahrain for Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. His daughter said he stopped working for international organizations last year because of harassment by the authorities.
Bahrain’s government has launched a crackdown against opposition activists, media and Shiite villages after it quelled weeks of pro-democracy protests.

The former chief editor of Bahrain’s main opposition newspaper said Sunday that he has been summoned by a prosecutor investigating the paper’s allegedly unethical coverage of the uprising. Mansoor al-Jamri, former editor-in-chief of Al-Wasat newspaper, said he and two other former top editors will answer the prosecutor’s questions Monday.

Security forces have arrested 400 people, including 15 women, in a series of raids, according to Khalil al-Marzuk, an MP with main Shiite opposition group Al-Wefaq which resigned en masse in protest at the violence.
About 800 people have been fired from both government and private sector jobs for responding to a call for a general strike in mid-March, he said.

Newspaper reports say those who stayed at home during the strike have been dismissed. Some 750 employees have been sacked, including 190 from the national oil company and 111 Education Ministry staff, said Al-Wasat.
Physicians for Human Rights, a U.S.-based group that campaigns on behalf of medical staff working in crisis zones, said Saturday police forces still tightly controlled the country’s only public referral hospital and continued to harass patients and staff.

Security forces occupied the Salmaniya Medical Complex on March 16, the day they cleared a square in Manama of pro-democracy protesters.
During the crackdown, police and soldiers entered operating theaters and a number of doctors at the hospital had disappeared, said the group’s deputy director Richard Sollom during a fact-finding mission in Bahrain.