There are a lot of bad things you can say about outgoing FIFA President Sepp Blatter, but at least he’s never been accused of being complicit in physically torturing anybody. One can’t say the same about one of the five presidential candidates who passed FIFA’s “integrity checks” this weekend, though.

FIFA president Sepp Blatter not giving up power without fight: ‘He doesn’t feel he is out of the job’

Meet Sheikh Salman Bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa of Bahrain, one of the candidates FIFA deemed to have enough integrity to lead world soccer when Blatter finally steps down next year. Currently the president of the Asian Football Confederation, Sheikh Salman has garnered extensive criticism from groups like Human Rights Watch, Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain and the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy for his alleged ties to a 2011 crackdown of anti-government protesters that resulted in hundreds of people, including Bahraini soccer players, being imprisoned and tortured.

Specifically, Sheikh Salman is accused of heading a special commission “to identify and punish more than 150 members of the sporting community who had peacefully protested,” according to an Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain press statement.

“Sheikh Salman played a key role in Bahrain’s retaliation against athlete-protesters,” the statement continues. “Throughout the government crackdown, he allegedly examined photographs of the protesters, identifying Bahraini athletes for the security forces. The authorities then used this information to arrest, detain and publicly defame all who were named, of which many credibly allege that they were tortured during detention.”

Those allegations come on top of others Sheikh Salman’s been accused of participating in, including a 2009 scandal involving election-rigging and vote buying.Sheikh Salman, who has never faced a tribunal for his alleged actions, has publicly denied the claims, which perhaps was enough for FIFA to shrug them off.

FIFA’s so-called integrity checks purport to examine, among other things, “media reports concerning potential red flags” pertaining to human rights violations, fraudulent behavior and more.

In a statement sent to The Washington Post, FIFA spokesman David Noemi said the committee did assess the allegations against Sheikh Salman pertaining to his alleged involvement into the events in Bahrain in 2011; the committee, however, did not find evidence of “any personal and direct involvement” of Sheikh into these alleged activities.

“Therefore, the Ad-hoc Electoral Committee concluded that there were no grounds to disqualify his candidacy,” Noemi said.

As it stands now, Sheikh Salman is one of the leading candidates to replace Blatter, according to the Guardian, because he’s relatively new to FIFA. Having only been elected to the executive committee in 2013, many see Sheikh Salman as one of the few candidates not tainted by the decades of bribery and other scandals that have become integral to FIFA’s core operations over the last few decades. This frightens some.

“If a member of Bahrain’s royal family is the cleanest pair of hands that FIFA can find, then the organization would appear to have the shallowest and least ethical pool of talent in world sport,” Human Rights Watch researcher Nicholas McGeehan told the Guardian last month.

Other candidates approved by FIFA to run in the Feb. 26 election include: Prince Ali Al Hussein, who ran and lost against Blatter in May; Jerome Champagne, who served on FIFA’s executive committee from 1999 to 2010; Gianni Infantino, a close associate of former front runner Michel Platini, the UEFA chief whose candidacy has been suspended due to an ongoing investigation into allegations that he accepted an unlawful payment; and Tokyo Sexwale, the current head of FIFA’s committee overseeing the development of soccer in Palestine.

A sixth candidate whom FIFA ran its integrity checks on, Musa Bility, the head of the Liberian soccer association, failed to pass for undisclosed reasons.

“For reasons of protection of personality rights, the Ad-hoc Electoral Committee . . . will not comment publicly on the specifics of its decision,” FIFA said in a statement.