Saudileaks: Cable Reveals Saudi Role in Suppressing Bahraini People

One of the documents gained and released by the Yemen Cyber Army after its May hacking of the Saudi Foreign Ministry discloses the strong attempts made by Saudi Arabia to convince the western powers to supply the Bahraini regime with the needed weapons to crack down on the revolution in the Persian Gulf island state.

The Saudi Foreign Ministry was hacked by the Yemen Cyber Army in May, and a copy of its information was sent to FNA and another one to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.

One of the YCA-released documents reveals that the Saudi government has sent similar letters to the then British Foreign Secretary, William Hague, and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asking them to intervene to lift the arms embargo on Bahrain, claiming the country is facing serious security challenges and violent acts supported by other regional forces.

Anti-government protesters have been holding peaceful demonstrations across Bahrain since mid-February 2011, calling for an end to the al-Khalifa dynasty’s over-40-year rule, end of discrimination, establishment of justice and a democratically-elected government as well as freedom of detained protesters.

Violence against the defenseless people escalated after a Saudi-led conglomerate of police, security and military forces from the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council (PGCC) member states – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Qatar – were dispatched to the tiny Persian Gulf kingdom on March 13, 2011, to help Manama crack down on peaceful protests.

So far, hundreds of people have been killed, hundreds more have gone missing and thousands of others have been injured.

In January 2013, sources in Bahrain and several media outlets in the West disclosed that the Manama rulers have secretly signed military and security agreements with the West, specially the US and the UK, to purchase military and anti-riot grid to crack down on protests.

“In addition to their arms sales to the regime, both Britain and America help the al-Khalifa regime with the suppression of the people’s revolution through their recommendations,” a leader of Bahrain’s al-Ahrar Movement Jafar al-Hessabi told FNA in 2013.

He noted that after the outbreak of the revolution in Bahrain, several experts of the UK’s Scotland Yard have been in Manama to advise the al-Khalifa regime on how to crack down on the people.

“Bahrain has military agreements with Britain and this country exports weapons to Bahrain, and the Bahraini crown prince was recently in the UK to sign new agreements (with that country),” al-Hessabi said.

Late in May, the Yemen Cyber Army released a portion of the information and documents that it had gained in its recent cyber attack on Saudi Arabia’s Foreign, Interior and Defense Ministries.

The Yemen Cyber Army announced that it has hacked the website, servers and archives of Saudi Arabia’s Foreign, Interior and Defense ministries and would release thousands of these top secret documents.

The group claimed that it “has gained access to the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) network and have full control over more than 3000 computers and servers, and thousands of users. We also have access to the emails, personal and secret information of hundreds of thousands of their staff and diplomats in different missions around the world”.

The hackers’ statement, which said the cyber army has also attacked the Saudi Interior and Defense ministries and vowed to release their details later, was carried by several globally known hackers websites.

Following the hack in May, the Yemen Cyber Army sent a copy of its information to FNA and another one to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.

“WikiLeaks released over 60,000 documents on Friday and vowed to release the rest in coming weeks, but we plan to release the documents in separate news items since many of them contain the names of foreign nationals who have demanded visit to Saudi Arabia, for example for Hajj pilgrimage, and their names have been mentioned among the Saudi agents. Thus releasing the list of names and documents might hurt innocent individuals who have done nothing, but applied for visa at a Saudi embassy for doing Hajj pilgrimage,” FNA English Editor-in-Chief Seyed Mostafa Khoshcheshm said.

“The number of the documents is way beyond the 500,000 that has been announced by WikiLeaks, but they need to be checked first to make sure that they do not contain misleading information and are not harmful to innocent people,” he added.