Dubai: A mob attacked a police station outside Manama with petrol bombs, police said late on Saturday, as sporadic protests intensify in Bahrain.
“Some 150 people attacked with Molotov cocktails” in the Shiite village of Sitra, provincial police said in a statement carried by the official BNA news agency. Security forces “managed to repel the attack by a group of terrorists” and arrested the driver of a car “carrying a large number of petrol bombs ready for use”, the police statement said. One police officer was lightly injured in the attack, it said, adding that security forces were searching for the culprits.
It was not immediately clear if the attack on the police station followed an anti-government demonstration in Sitra. On August 18, a 16-year-old protester died after what opposition activists in Bahrain said was a “brutal attack” by security forces, but the Bahrain government described it as a defensive response to a petrol bomb attack on police. The government identified the dead youth as Hussam Al Haddad, and said he had been among protesters throwing petrol bombs at police and had died after being taken to hospital.
The opposition Bahrain Centre for Human Rights said witnesses claimed it had seen security forces firing gunshot pellets at Al Haddad before men in plainclothes kicked him repeatedly as he lay on the ground while police stood by.
The main opposition Wefaq movement said in a statement in Arabic that Al Haddad had been “martyred after being brutally attacked”. The government maintained police had only acted in self-defence.
