Saturday, April 02, 2011

DUBAI: Bahrain released a prominent blogger but detained several other people, including a pro-opposition doctor, the latest in a series of arrests since a crackdown on protests, opposition sources said Friday.

The island kingdom’s Sunni rulers have stepped up arrests of cyber activists and Shiites, with more than 300 detained and dozens missing since security forces broke up pro-democracy street protests earlier this month.
It imposed martial law and called in troops from fellow Sunni-ruled neighbors, including Saudi Arabia, to quell the protest movement led mostly by the state’s Shiite majority.

Mattar Ibrahim Mattar, a member of Bahrain’s largest Shiite opposition group, Al-Wefaq, said the party’s official arrest count was 329 by Thursday, but that the real number was likely to be more than 400.
He said at least 20 people had been detained Thursday and 31 were missing. It was unclear if those people were in hiding or had been abducted.
There have been several reports of missing people who have turned up dead days later, but activists say that many of their peers are also going into hiding to avoid arrest.

The severity of Bahrain’s crackdown stunned Bahrain’s Shiites and angered the region’s non-Arab Shiite power, Iran. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states, fearful of rising Iranian influence, see Bahrain as the biggest threat of all the popular uprisings that have swept the region since January.

“We demand the withdrawal of foreign troops, which entered Bahrain under the pretext of protecting Bahrain from external threat, and we call on those who have committed crimes against the people of Bahrain to be held accountable,” Iraqi MP Ahmed al-Chalabi said at a news conference in Baghdad.

“The problem in Bahrain may be a fuse to a large explosion in the whole region,” he said.

Prominent Bahraini blogger Mahmood al-Yousif, who for years has promoted anti-sectarianism under the slogan “No Shiite, No Sunni, Just Bahraini,” was detained Wednesday and released late Thursday.
“I’m back home now with my family. Everything is fine,” he told Reuters by telephone. “I’ve been treated well enough. They investigated me but didn’t find anything,” he said.

The U.S. had criticized the arrest while also renewing its condemnation of violence in Bahrain. “We’re deeply concerned about his arrest. He’s a prominent and respected blogger,” Mark Toner, a State Department spokesman, said Wednesday.

“We’re also concerned about reports of the detention of two other Internet activists who have expressed their views on recent events,” Toner said. “We hope the government’s decision to arrest bloggers and Internet activists will not make it more difficult to resume a national dialogue.”

Opposition sources said Abdul Khaleq al-Oraibi, a doctor at Salmaniya Hospital, Bahrain’s biggest, had also been detained.
Oraibi, who once considered running as a member of Parliament for Al-Wefaq, had been publicly critical of the lack of access for medics to wounded protesters. – Reuters, AFP