Bahrain Crackdown: ‘Disappeared’ Engineer Faces Military Trial
Local Editor
A telecom engineer forcibly disappeared by security forces a year ago will be among the first civilians to face a military court under an April 2017 constitutional amendment, Human Rights Watch reported.
Sayed Alawi's whereabouts remained unknown until an October 22 announcement by Bahrain's official news agency that he, along with three others, was in military custody and facing trial before a military court on terrorism-related charges.
Sayed Alawi, telecommunications engineer, was held incommunicado by Bahraini authorities for five weeks without access to a lawyer or his family.
Security forces detained Alawi, an employee of the state telecommunications company Batelco, at his workplace on October 24, 2016.
In the initial weeks following his detention, his family received contradictory and apparently inaccurate responses, as well as denials, from various security offices and police stations, to their inquiries on his whereabouts, his wife told Human Rights Watch at the time.
His family only heard from Alawi when he was finally allowed make three brief phone calls about six weeks apart between late November 2016 and late February 2017, and a fourth call of about one minute on July 27.
"Bahrain has managed to violate Sayed Alawi's fundamental human rights in multiple ways - forcibly disappearing him, detaining him without charge for a year, and making him face military judges," said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.
Security forces also forcibly disappeared one of the other defendants, Fadhel Radhi, for several weeks after they detained him at his home at 3 a.m. on September 29, 2016.
The arresting officers did not inform his family where he was being held or the reason for his detention, Amnesty International reported. The Office of the Public Prosecutor told his family on May 9 that Radhi's case had been transferred to military prosecutors.
The two others facing military trials are Mohamed Husain and Mohamed Abdulhassan.
Both were arrested in late May following a bloody assault by security forces on a sit-in in the village of Diraz, during which 5 protesters were martyred and 287 arrested. The London-based Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy [BIRD] said that all four have been held in incommunicado detention and without access to families or lawyers.
Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team
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