Saudi Arabia Praised Bahrain's Iran War Crackdown - What Followed Exposes All Their Worst Fears

Bahrain called it security, but the arrests, the torture case and the cancelled citizenships show a throne terrified of its own majority. Right, so a thirty-two-year-old man went out for a meal before dawn during Ramadan, with his cousin and a mate, and nine days later his parents got a phone call from a military hospital telling them to come in. They weren't told why. They turned up and found their son on a slab. Sayed Mohamed Almosawi, small business owner, and his body was covered in bruises and deep wounds, discoloured, black in places. An expert from a medical human rights group, the sort of people who do exactly this for a living, looked at the photographs and videos, alongside the official death report, and said the injuries were highly consistent with torture, and ruled out the heart attack the authorities claimed had killed him. That is where this starts. Not with a number, not with a press release. Not with Israel and this guy was not a Palestinian. This is Bahrain and the guy in question was one of their own. This is a story about a family told to come and collect a corpse, because the state that disappeared him accused him of being a spy for Iran and decided that was how he'd be coming home. And Bahrain wants you to call that espionage. The Interior Ministry said the National Intelligence Agency had him on spying charges, passing strategic-site information to Iran's Revolutionary Guard. A small shop owner.