Two policemen convicted of ‘torturing’ a protester to death in 2011 have had their jail terms slashed by four years following an appeal. The policemen were convicted of beating to death a Shiite detainee during a mass crackdown on dissent in 2011.
Bahrain’s appeals court reduced the jail terms of the policemen
involved from seven to three years, according to an anonymous
judicial source who spoke to AFP. They were convicted by a lower
court in December over two separate incidents.
Abdul Karim Fakhrawi died in April 2011 after nine days in
custody. While it was initially reported by Bahrain’s official
news agency that he died of kidney failure, photographs of
Fakhrawi’s body leaked online, sparking national outrage.
Fakhrawi was a co-founder of independent newspaper al-Wasat,
which temporarily had the plug pulled by authorities following a
nationwide crackdown on Shiite-led protests, starting in
mid-March 2011.
Even in December, the seven year sentence for the policeman
involved in Fakhrawi’s death was criticized as being too lenient.
“The prosecutor changed the charges from ‘torture leading to
death’ to ‘beating leading to death’. They don’t want to admit
that there was torture,” Sayed Hadi al-Mousawi, a member of
Bahrain’s Wefaq Society, told Reuters at the time of the
sentencing.
On Monday, a further policeman also had his sentence reduced from
seven years to three. He had been convicted of shooting a
protester dead in February 2011. Ali Musheime suffered birdshot
wounds. However, the court declared on Monday that the incident
had not been premeditated murder.
The wave of arrests which swept the nation meant that a number of
policemen later faced trials over killing protesters or torturing
detainees. According to the International Federation for Human
Rights, at least 89 people have been killed in the Sunni-ruled
kingdom since the unrest began.
Bahrain – home to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet – is ruled by a Sunni
monarchy, while over 75 percent of the population is Shia. In
February 2011, thousands of protesters swarmed the streets of
Bahrain’s capital Manama, demanding democratic reforms and the
resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Khalifa bin Salman
al-Khalifa.
Since then, Bahrain has faced widespread criticism over its harsh
sentencing of activists within the country. A decision to jail 50
Shiite activists for up to 15 years in a mass show trial led
Human rights watchdog, Amnesty International, to call the
verdict ‘appalling’ at the beginning of October. It also urged a
probe into reports that some activists were tortured.
In April this year, a UN torture investigator, Juan Mendez, said
that Bahrain has blocked him from a planned visit to the Gulf
Arab state, terming it an “effective cancellation,” since
no alternate dates were proposed.
The following month, Human Rights Watch (HRW) demanded that
authorities “immediately investigate allegations that
officials are torturing activists in detention.”
In Mid-September it emerged that Bahrain’s law enforcement had
also made a habit of regularly detaining children, who were
forced to undergo humiliation and cruel treatment often bordering
on torture, according to a HRW investigation.