Authorities in Bahrain detained three opposition activists for agitating against the Sunni-led regime, prompting clashes with the security forces in the Shiite-majority Gulf state.
Security forces used tear-gas to disperse around 100 stone-throwing protestors in a mainly Shiite western suburb of the capital Manama, an AFP correspondent witnessed.
An interior ministry statement confirmed that three opposition activists had been detained for “advocating regime change by illegimate means” and for “incitement to hatred against the regime, counched in indecent language.”
Prosecutors questioned the trio, ministry official Colonel Mohammed Rashed Bu Hamud said, and the public prosecutor’s office later announced they had been released on probation.
Authorities in Bahrain detained three opposition activists for agitating against the Sunni-led regime, prompting clashes with the security forces in the Shiite-majority Gulf state.
Security forces used tear-gas to disperse around 100 stone-throwing protestors in a mainly Shiite western suburb of the capital Manama, an AFP correspondent witnessed.
An interior ministry statement confirmed that three opposition activists had been detained for “advocating regime change by illegimate means” and for “incitement to hatred against the regime, counched in indecent language.”
Prosecutors questioned the trio, ministry official Colonel Mohammed Rashed Bu Hamud said, and the public prosecutor’s office later announced they had been released on probation.
Security sources named two of the three detainees as Hassen Meshema, leader of the opposition Movement of Liberties and Democracy, or Haq, and Abdel Hadi Al-Khawaja, chairman of the Bahraini Human Rights Centre, both of them Shiites.
Opposition sources named the third as activist Shaker Abdel Al.
Defence lawyer Hassan Ridha told AFP the public prosecutor’s office “could summon them again later” if the case against them was not considered closed.
Special police units seized the trio in morning raids on their homes, an emigre official of the Haq group, Abdel Jalil Senkis, told AFP by telephone from London.
The authorities had been angered by a news conference the trio held on Monday in which they raised accusations levelled by an alleged British spy that a “secret organisation” existed within the government aimed at maintaining Sunni domination of the Gulf archipelago, Senkis added.
Sudanese-born Salah al-Bandar, who had worked as a consultant in a government department before making the accusations, was expelled from Bahrain in September.
The following month, Bahrain’s high court banned publication of any information on the purported plot.
Last November, the Haq group charged in a letter to then UN chief Kofi Annan that the government planned to rig that month’s parliamentary elections through gerrymandering and stuffing the electoral rolls with newly naturalized Sunnis of south Asian origin.
The Haq group, which has yet to be registered by the Bahraini authorities, did not contest last year’s elections in which another Shiite opposition movement — the Islamic National Accord Association (INAA) — participated for the first time since parliament was restored in 2002.
The INAA won 17 of the 40 seats in parliament but boycotted the new legislature when it convened in December, dismissing King Hamad’s reforms as a “cosmetic exercise.”
Bahrain is a close ally of the United States, and hosts the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet.