Two supporters of Bahrain’s anti-government movement died in police custody on Saturday after physical abuse at the hands of security officials, activists said.
The Bahraini interior ministry said yesterday that the body of Rashid Zakaria Hassan, 40, was found in a detention facility and a medical examiner determined that he died of complications from sickle-cell anemia.
Hassan was detained on April 2 on charges of “inciting hatred, publishing false news, promoting sectarianism and calling for overthrowing of the regime” on social networking sites, the ministry said.
The opposition party, al-Wefaq, said the death occurred in “mysterious circumstances.”
The ministry said another detainee, Ali Isa Saqer, 31, died on Saturday in police custody after “creating chaos at the detention center.”
Activists say both men were subjected to physical and mental abuse and might have died as a result, Nabeel Rajab of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR) said.
“We believed they killed them in prison,” Rajab said.
The ministry said Saqer was hurt while resisting guards’ attempts to restrain him and he died in a hospital.
Saqer was detained March 13 for attempted murder of a policeman, it said.
Authorities also detained and beat a prominent human rights activist as they waged a continuing widespread crackdown on the opposition in the tiny Gulf nation, the BCHR and his relatives said.
The BCHR said Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, who formerly worked for international human rights organizations, was detained on Saturday in a pre-dawn raid. Al-Khawaja’s daughter, Zainab, confirmed the arrest and said her father was taken from her house in a Shiite village outside the capital Manama.
She said armed and masked men, some wearing black police uniforms and carrying riot gear, stormed her house around 2am. They beat her father unconscious before taking him into custody along with her husband and her brother-in-law, she added.
Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, 50, is a former Middle East and North Africa director of Frontline Defenders rights organization. He 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.
Abdulhadi al-Khawaja’s son-in-law, Mohammed al-Maskati, who also is an activist, was in the house during Saturday’s raid. He said armed men in black uniforms bound him with plastic handcuffs and forced him to lie on the ground face down while agents beat him. One man kept a foot on his neck, he said.
Bahrain declared emergency rule last month and cracked down on protests by the country’s Shiite majority against a Sunni monarchy, detaining hundreds of activists and anti-government protesters.
At least 27 people have been killed since Feb. 14 when protests began in the strategically important Gulf kingdom, the home of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet.
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