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Bahrain shuts down prominent newspaper amid opposition crackdown

June 5, 2017 at 2:22 am

Bahrain shut down yesterday the independent daily newspaper Al-Wasat “until further notice” over an article about unrest in Morocco, while authorities are cracking down on dissent in the country, the state-run Bahrain News Agency (BNA) reported, quoting an official statement by the Bahraini information affairs ministry.

The closure was due to an article “affecting the relations of the Kingdom of Bahrain with other countries,” according to the statement.

The newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Mansoor Al-Jamri, said that the order had come as a “total surprise,” stressing that “we didn’t have any due process basically.”

Al-Jamri explained that the closure was due to a story on the on page 19 of the newspaper’s Sunday edition that focused on recent protests in northern Morocco’s El Hoceima – an area that has seen widespread unrest since last October. The column had insulted a “sisterly Arab country,” according to the ministry statement.

The sudden closure of the daily Al-Wasat marks the third time authorities have ordered it to stop publishing a print edition since the 2011 Arab Spring protests. It also comes just after officials briefly banned the newspaper in January from publishing online.

Al-Wasat, widely seen as the only independent newspaper in Bahrain, was founded in 2002 by a group of Bahraini investors. It is associated with the mainly Shiite Muslim-led opposition, which has been facing a crackdown by the Sunni-led government since last year.

The co-founder of the newspaper, Karim Fakhrawi, was arrested in April 2011. He died of alleged torture in detention one week after his arrest.

Over the past year, Bahrain’s Sunni-ruled government has arrested or forced activists into exile while breaking up major opposition political parties in the Shiite-majority nation.