MANAMA (The Thursday Times) — A Bahraini court has postponed its verdict in a mass trial of 69 people, 60 of them Shia clerics, as rights groups accused the authorities of extracting confessions under torture and holding parts of the proceedings in secret.
Bahrain’s High Criminal Court had been expected to rule on November 8. The defendants face terrorism-related charges that include forming “a terrorist group” to overthrow the “constitutional regime” and promoting Iran’s doctrine of the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist, according to a summary of the charges by the rights groups. Some are also accused of running an unlawful organisation and financing terrorism.
Of the 56 defendants in custody, 47 are clerics and nine are affiliates, including religious reciters. They include prominent figures such as Sheikh Mohammed Sanqour and Sheikh Ali Al-Sadadi, who led Friday prayers at the Imam Al-Sadiq Grand Mosque in Duraz, home to the country’s largest Shia congregation.
Torture allegations
In a joint statement released on November 10, Human Rights Watch, the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, and other groups said detainees had described forced standing, prolonged blindfolding, sleep deprivation, and threats of violence against themselves and their families, as well as threats to revoke their citizenship.
The groups said defence lawyers had been denied copies of the case files, that defendants in custody were made to appear by video link, and that identical passages appeared in different defendants’ confessions. They also said the unit responsible for investigating torture claims had dismissed complaints without examining key evidence.
The statement said some of the evidence put forward included religious teaching, books, and religious taxes, which it said risked treating religious identity as a crime. The groups called for coerced confessions to be excluded and for those held for peaceful religious activity to be released.
The Thursday Times could not find a public response from the Bahraini authorities to the statement. Bahrain, whose ruling family is Sunni and whose population is majority Shia, has for years accused Iran of backing unrest in the kingdom, which Tehran denies.
