Bahrain frees British sailor from prison after royal pardon

A British Royal Navy sailor has been freed from prison in Bahrain after the Gulf state’s king granted him a royal pardon, making him the latest British national to be released from imprisonment in the Gulf region.

According to media outlets, 22-year-old Royal Navy sailor Owen Haggerty – from Johnstone in Scotland’s Renfrewshire – was handed a three-month prison sentence by Bahraini authorities last month after reportedly trying to break up a fight in public.

His mother Kirsty Reynolds told the Scottish newspaper The Daily Record that she wrote to Bahrain’s king Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa to request a royal pardon for Haggerty, and had “burst out crying” when she received the news that the pardon was accepted.

Following the development, Labour’s MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South, Johanna Baxter, stated that she was “very pleased that he has been granted a royal pardon by the King of Bahrain” and that the news would be a “a tremendous relief” for Haggerty’s family, friends, and colleagues.

She complained, however, during her address to the parliament in the weekly business questions session on Thursday, that nobody from the British government spoke with her about the case when Haggerty was in the Bahraini prison, “and that was because apparently I did not have his explicit consent.” She insisted that “I had his mother’s consent. She was also a constituent, and yet still nobody would speak to me.”

Lucy Powell, the Leader of the Commons, responded to that by asserting that it was because of Baxter’s advocacy that the government then informed her of the pardon, stressing that the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office had worked tirelessly to secure it.

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