A Bahraini female doctor has detailed the humiliations and beatings she suffered after being arrested on suspicion of supporting anti-government protests. Roula al-Saffar says her interrogators tried to force her and other medical staff to confess to plotting to overthrow the Manama regime.
Saffar said that she was tortured by electric shocks and beaten by cables. She also said that she heard the screams of inmates who were being tortured by interrogators in other cells.
Her remarks came days after another female Bahraini doctor, Nada Dhaif, recounted mistreatment at the hands of government’s forces. Dhaif was sentenced to 15 years behind bars for treating injured anti-regime protesters at Salmaniya hospital.
”It was 03:00 a.m., when they broke into my house. I was taken away blindfolded and handcuffed. I didn’t know that they were security forces,” she said adding that ”They were in civilians clothes. So, I thought I was actually being kidnapped”.
Dhaif said, ”I was thinking that I was being taken to an unknown place. Later on, I came to know that they were from the Central Investigation Department (CID)”.
”Immediately after I was taken away…I was treated with beating and cursing”. She said the torturers had even touched her face, using ‘electrocuters.’
”I was crying and I lost consciousness two or three times during this time in the military clinic.”
Many of those released from jails in Bahrain have accused the Manama regime of serious abuse. Some also claim that a member of Bahrain’s royal family named Sheikha Noora bint Ibrahim Al Khalifa beat prisoners with sticks and rubber hoses and gave them electric shocks.
Several Bahraini prisoners have died under torture.
