Ayatollah Qassim: Bahraini Detainees Scoring Victory Over Their Executioner

By Staff

The great Bahraini cleric His Eminence Ayatollah Sheikh Isa Qassim said the regime tells the detainees, “You will die at our hands,” but the latter reply that they are “scoring a victory for Islam and Muslims against the will of the executioner”.

“‘The government tells the prisoners: You will die at our hands,’ referring to the prisoners’ response to the government: ‘We tell our people that we are scoring a victory for Islam and the nation over the will of the executioner; we are not to bow down, for that is impossible in terms of our Islam, zeal and honor.’,” a tweet by Sheikh Qassim’s Twitter account read.

A large number of dissidents are languishing in Al Khalifa prisons on fabricated and flimsy charges in an attempt to silence them about the injustice, corruption and deprivation experienced by the Bahraini people, most notably Sheikh Ali Salman, Secretary General of Al-Wefaq Society which is the largest political society in the tiny Gulf kingdom, and head of the largest parliamentary bloc in the history of Bahraini parliamentary work. Furthermore, many Bahraini deputies had been arrested, tortured, stripped of their nationalities and exiled outside their country.

The Al Khalifa regime has arrested nearly 15,000 people during the 12 years of the crisis because of their political opinions, and thus has become the first Arab country with the largest number of prisoners in the past years, according to a report published by the Institute for Criminal Policy Research. The number of its detainees once numbered about 4,500 political prisoners who live in inhumane conditions.

According to the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, “a large number of prisoners are placed in correctional institutions that do not meet the minimum standards for the treatment of prisoners.”

Calls continue from the international community and human rights organizations to improve prison conditions and stop ill-treatment, especially towards detainees who have been subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention and unfair trials for their anti-government stances.