Ex-Bahrain MP gets jail term over anti-regime tweets
A Bahraini court has sentenced a former Shia lawmaker to a year in prison for remarks against the ruling Al Khalifa regime.
Khalid Abdul Aal has been sentenced to one year behind bars on charges of insulting the Interior Ministry via his tweets posted in April 2014.
The opposition figure has rejected the ruling, saying he did not intend to insult anyone and that he only criticized some measures adopted by the ministry.
The former lawmaker said that the sentence showed lack of freedom of speech in the monarchy, stressing that he will appeal the court ruling.
The jail sentence against the Bahraini opposition figure is seen as part of the Manama regime’s suppression of anti-regime protesters since 2011, during which scores of Bahraini people have been killed and thousands more injured.
Many protesters have also been taken into custody.
In April, Amnesty International warned against the Bahraini regime’s “unabated” human rights abuses despite repeated remarks from the officials that the situation is improving.
The London-based rights group denounced Bahrain’s violations of human rights in a report, which detailed dozens of cases of detainees being beaten, deprived of adequate food, burned with cigarettes, sexually assaulted and subjected to electric shocks.
Meanwhile, Bahrainis took to the streets in the northern village of al Musalla as well as Bilad al-Qadeem, a suburb of the capital, Manama, calling for the release of political prisoners, including top Shia opposition leader Sheikh Ali Salman, who has been in custody since December 2014.
AR/NN/HRB
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