A Bahrain emergency appeals court upheld death sentences on
Sunday for two men found guilty of killing police officers during recent
unrest, punishments human rights activists said were designed to prevent more
protests.
Two other men who were among the four initially sentenced to
death on April 28 had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment, the state
news agency said.
The report did not say when the two executions would be carried
out, but Manama-based legal expert Mohammed Ahmed said they would first need to
be approved by Bahrain’s king.
Bahrain, home of the US Fifth Fleet, faced a wave of Shi’ite-led
protests in February and March demanding democratic reform and an end to
sectarian discrimination in the Sunni-ruled kingdom. Some hardliners demanded a
republic.
Bahrain’s rulers imposed emergency law and called in troops from
neighbouring Gulf countries in March to quash the protests, which amounted to
the greatest threat to the island kingdom’s
Sunni rulers in Bahrain’s history.
Nabeel Rajab, head of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, questioned
the ruling.
“This is a political case and it’s aimed at stopping
the protests,” he said by telephone. “It’s believed that they were targeted
because of their (political) activities.”
He said one of the two people sentenced to death had a full-length
cast on his left leg when the killing took place.
“The man had a broken leg and was moving with crutches,
how could he drive a car?” he added.
At least 29 people, all but six of them Shi’ites, have been killed
since the protests started, inspired by Arab revolts that ousted the autocratic
rulers of Egypt and Tunisia.
The six non-Shi’ites included two foreigners – an Indian and
a Bangladeshi – and four policemen. A hospital source said in March that at
least two of four Bahraini policemen killed during the protests had been run
over by cars on March 16.
The death sentences were only the third in more than three decades
issued against Bahraini citizens of Bahrain.
One of the prior death penalty cases came in the mid-1990s, during
the greatest political unrest Bahrain had seen before this year. A protester
was put to death by firing squad for killing a policeman during that time.
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