Bahrain court upholds death sentence against two men in 2014 case

Bahrain's top court has upheld death sentences against two men convicted of bombing a convoy and killing a police officer, as human rights groups said their conviction was based on confessions extracted through torture.

Mohammed Ramadhan and Husain Moosa lost their final appeal on Monday against death sentences that were initially handed down by a criminal court in December 2014, a statement from the kingdom's public prosecutor said.

The kingdom's highest court in 2015 confirmed the death sentences but then overturned them after the emergence of a previously undisclosed medical report by the Minister of Interior, which Human Rights Watch (HRW) said appeared to corroborate claims the detainees had been tortured to force them to confess to fabricated charges.

But an appeals court in January 2020 reinstated the sentences, which were upheld on Monday.

Security forces arrested Moosa, a hotel employee, and Ramadhan, a security guard in Bahrain's international airport, in early 2014 after a policeman was killed in the bombing in al-Deir, a village northeast of the capital, Manama. Ten other people tried with them have also been jailed.

Amnesty International and a UK-based pro-opposition activist group, the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (BIRD), have also said both men were tortured to extract false confessions, subjected to sexual assault, beatings, sleep deprivation and other abuses. 

"The terror of knowing that my husband can be executed by firing squad at any moment without proper notice is tearing me apart," Ramadhan's wife, Zainab Ebrahim, tweeted after the sentence.

Bahrain's government has denied it tortures prisoners or persecutes the opposition. It said the case met all requirements of a fair trial, and the initial judgement was followed by a second trial that looked into the allegations of abuse.

"Each of the defendants had an attorney present with him throughout all the stages of the trial," said Haroon al-Zayani, head of the public prosecutor's technical bureau, in a statement sent to Reuters news agency.

By Al- Helalee