Protesters Detained by Plain-Cloth Agents in Bahrain's Diraz

Rasa - Local media said that several protesters who were detained by plain-cloth agents in Bahraini village of Diraz, informed their families that they are held in the Criminal Investigations Department building.

News ID: 426916

Date: 28 January 2017 - 22:59

RNA - The arrested protesters have contacted their families by phone, saying that they had been arrested by armed civilian agents, when protesters in Diraz clashed with security forces, and now they are at Criminal Investigations Department building, Bahrain Mirror reported.

In this context, observers ridiculed how local newspapers doubted that government security forces were the ones that opened fire on protesters in Diraz; an attack that caused a severe head injury to one of the protesters, who currently lies in the hospital in a critical condition.

Local newspapers believed that the shooters at Diraz protesters are "unknown", amid an ambiguous silence by the Ministry of Interior regarding the all incident.

Observers wondered, "Are those unknown masked individuals providing services to the Criminal Investigations Department as well?" in reference to the detention of some protesters after the sudden armed attack Thursday dawn.

For his part, former al-Wefaq MP Ali al-Aswad, believed in a post on "Twitter" that "the same militias that shot young man Mostafa Hamdan, have detained 7 citizens, who are currently held in the Criminal Investigations building, and there is no need to fabricate news". He stressed that the armed men are affiliated with the Bahraini government.

Since June 2016, Bahraini security forces have imposed a tightened siege that denies entry or exit from and to Diraz, unless through checkpoints.

The aforementioned newspaper allegations came despite an abundance of video evidence on the incident, which exhibit intensified security presence around Diraz, just before armed forces raided the sit-in space, and detained a number of young men. The armed security men, covered and masked in black, had stormed into Diraz after parking their civilian cars by one of the town's entrances.

Reports said yesterday that police in Bahrain carried out a dawn raid Thursday against supporters of a Shiite cleric on trial in the Sunni-ruled kingdom during which one man was shot and wounded, witnesses said. Security forces intervened in the village of Diraz, west of the capital, where protesters have been staging sit-ins since authorities revoked Sheikh Isa Qassim's citizenship in June. A 21-year-old man was hospitalized with a bullet wound to his head after the raid.

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