23 Accused of Coup Plot in Bahrain
Bahraini officials announced on Saturday that they were charging 23 people, most of them activists from the Shiite majority, with
however coordinating a violent campaign to overthrow the minority Sunni government.
Prosecutors charged Abduljalil al-Singace, Mohamed Habeeb al-Saffaf and Abdulhadi al-Mokhaidar, as well as two Shiite political leaders based in Britain. The other 18 were believed to have been part of a network accused of planning and executing a campaign of violence, intimidation and subversion in the gulf kingdom, which prosecutors have described as a sophisticated terrorist network with international support. Last year, several of the same men were charged with similar offenses but were officially pardoned by the king.
King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa called for stricter regulation of mosques, schools and civil society groups in his Ramadan address on Sunday. He said the people charged under the terrorism statutes had mistakenly taken their previous pardons “as evidence that they were above the law.”
The king said that the accused were “un-Islamic” and that Bahrain would continue its political and economic reform projects “to bridge the gap between
however the Islamic sects” despite unrest among the Shiite majority.
