MANAMA, 17 February 2003 — King Hamad yesterday described a terror cell Bahrain said it smashed this week as an “isolated case” as relatives of the five Bahrainis allegedly belonging to the ring protested at the publication of the suspects’ pictures.
“This is an isolated case,” the official BNA news agency quoted Hamad as saying. He voiced “regret and astonishment” that there should be Bahrainis prepared to carry out acts that would “harm the security of citizens and residents and undermine the economy,” according to BNA.
King Hamad said he hoped the five men arrested on suspicion of planning terror attacks would turn out to be innocent, but warned that they would be subject to the full force of the law if proven guilty.
The daily Al-Ayyam reported yesterday that the men’s relatives and a member of the Gulf state’s parliament had protested precisely because the names and photographs of the five had been released before they were convicted. “The suspects are innocent until proven guilty,” it quoted MP Mohammad Khaled as saying.
“The law requires the public prosecutor to refer the accused to trial within 48 hours, which has not happened so far,” he said, charging that the five, “who are known for their honesty, were arrested in order to please America.”
Bahrain, home to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, announced on Saturday it had broken up a terror ring of five people possibly linked to Al-Qaeda network.
The mother of Bassam Abderrazzak Abdullah Bukhua, one of the suspects, said the release of his name and picture amounted to treating him “like a criminal terrorist, whereas he has not been proven guilty.”
She said security services had broken into their home and seized prints of material retrieved from websites linked to Afghan Mujahedeen (fighters).
The brother of another suspect, Jamal Hilal Mohammad Al-Baloochi, also protested at the publication of his photograph and complained that security forces had stormed the family home and seized videotapes of speeches of Osama Bin Laden and slain Chechen commader Khattab.
Public prosecutor Sheikh Abderrahman ibn Jaber Al-Khalifa, meanwhile, told Al-Ayyam that Manama would not hand over the five men to Washington even if they are convicted of membership in Al-Qaeda, which has been blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the United States.
“Bahrain’s law and constitution prohibit this. We will apply to the accused the law in force in Bahrain, which has an independent judiciary. The prosecution does not distinguish between political and non-political cases,” he said. (AFP)
