Bahrain charges opposition leader on US diplomat meeting

Leader of the biggest opposition movement in Bahrain and his top aide have been charged over holding a meeting with a US diplomat earlier this week.

Bahrain’s public prosecutor’s office said on Thursday that Al-Wefaq party leader Sheikh Ali Salman and his assistant Khalil al-Marzouq were charged with violating the country’s law on foreign contacts for holding a meeting with Tom Malinowski, the US assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor on July 6.

It said the two should have obtained permission before meeting Malinowski at the US embassy in Manama.

The opposition leader and his assistant were interrogated at the Criminal Investigations Department a day before being summoned to the public prosecutor’s office on Thursday. The two were freed after guaranteeing their places of residence.

Malinowski was expelled from Bahrain, home to US Navy’s 5th fleet, earlier this week after being accused of intervening “flagrantly” in the state’s internal affairs. The US official left the country on July 8 after being declared persona non grata by Bahrain’s Foreign Ministry.

US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Washington is “deeply concerned” over Malinowski’s expulsion from Bahrain, adding that his visit “had been coordinated far in advance and warmly welcomed and encouraged by the government of Bahrain.”

Sheikh Salman’s Al-Wefaq Party has now confirmed the charges and called them unfair. The Shia party says no regulations to ban meeting foreigners had ever been implemented before, and no one had been prosecuted for such cases.

Since mid-February 2011, thousands of protesters have held numerous demonstrations in the streets of Bahrain, calling on the Al Khalifa royal family to relinquish power. Scores of Bahrainis have been killed and hundreds of others injured and arrested in the ongoing crackdown on peaceful demonstrations