Manama, July 18 (ANI): A 20-year-old Bahraini poet Ayat al-Gormezi has claimed that she was repeatedly beaten by a female member of the al-Khalifa royal family, when she was in prison for reciting a poem at a pro-democracy protest rally.
In an interview with The Independent, Gormezi, said that although her interrogators had tried to blindfold her, she could see a woman in civilian clothes beating her.
"I was able to see a woman of about 40 in civilian clothes who was beating me on the head with a baton" Gormezi said.
Gormezi later described her interrogator to prison guards, who, she said, promptly named the woman as being one of the al-Khalifas with a senior position in the Bahraini security service.
"I was taken many times to her office for fresh beatings," Gormezi said.
"She would say, 'You should be proud of the al-Khalifas. They are not going to leave this country. It is their country'," she added.
Gormezi was detained on 30 March at her parents' house after spending two weeks in hiding when the government, backed by a Saudi-led force, started a brutal crackdown on pro-democracy protests in mid-March.
She had been targeted by the authorities after she read out a poem at a rally in February which contained the lines, 'we are the people who will kill humiliation and assassinate misery. We are the people who will destroy injustice.'
Subjected to nine days of torture after her detention, Gormezi described how she was beaten across the face with electric cables, kept in a tiny, freezing cell and forced to clean lavatories with her bare hands.
All the while, she was beaten on the head and the body until she lost consciousness. (ANI)
|
|
Comments:
