Bahrain Activist Gets 5-Year Sentence for ‘Insulting’ Tweets<br />Saudi Arabia wrote that It fills me with shame that my country, Bahrain, is bombing Yemen, with United States support,<br />Bahrain said that It is absolutely outrageous that he be forced to spend a further five years in jail simply for daring to voice his opinions online.<br />He is already serving a two-year sentence handed down in July for comments he made in television interviews,<br />and faces more charges related to an Op-Ed published in The New York Times in 2016, "Letter From a Bahraini Jail." In it, Mr. Rajab recounted a recent meeting with John Kerry, then the secretary of state "I would like to ask Mr. Kerry now: Is this the kind of ally America wants?" he wrote.<br />21, 2018<br />LONDON — A court in Bahrain sentenced a prominent democracy advocate on Wednesday to five years in prison for tweets about abuses in prisons and the Saudi-led war in Yemen, continuing the crackdown<br />that crushed the Arab Spring uprising there seven years ago.<br />As those charges were pending, Mr. Rajab reiterated his criticisms last May in another opinion column in<br />The New York Times appealing to President Trump on the eve of his trip to Riyadh, the Saudi capital.<br />Backed by rulers in neighboring Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain’s Sunni Muslim royal family has used tanks, riot police officers, sweeping arrests<br />and tight censorship to thwart demands for democracy among the Shiite Muslim majority, and the resulting conflict has inflamed sectarian tensions around the region.
