Dubai: A Bahraini court on Thursday sentenced six people to life in prison for inciting riots to lure police towards a bomb, a judicial source said.
The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the six, all Shiite Muslims, were found guilty of inciting a mass riot on November 25, 2014.
The riot was aimed at attracting security forces to the eastern village of Diraz, where a homemade bomb went off near a patrol car, wounding two officers, the source said.
The Bahraini government has accused Iran of fomenting instability in the country and backing anti-government terrorist groups.
Last year the Washington Post reported that Western intelligence agencies are seeing growing boldness by Iran in supporting armed insurgents in the kingdom, according to multiple analysts from the United States and two Western European governments, speaking to the publication.
Documents and interviews with current and former intelligence officials describe an elaborate training programme, orchestrated by Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, to school Bahraini militants in the techniques of advanced bombmaking and guerrilla warfare.
A wide variety of increasingly sophisticated weaponry — much of it forensically linked to Iran — has been discovered in Bahrain over the past three years, including hundreds of pounds of military-grade explosives that almost certainly originated in Iran, US and European intelligence officials say.
The efforts appear to mirror similar ongoing operations to build a network of pro-Tehran militant groups elsewhere in the Middle East, from Yemen to Iraq and Syria, several analysts said.
“We are seeing more evidence of an Iranian destabilisation effort,” said a US intelligence official with years of experience monitoring Bahrain’s civil and political unrest.
-With inputs from AFP
