MANAMA (Dispatches) – A Bahraini teenager has sustained injuries after regime forces fired tear gas and shots to disperse a group of teenage students holding an anti-regime gathering in the eastern part of the kingdom.
The students had come together outside their school building on Sitra Island, situated 5 kilometers south of the capital, Manama, on Wednesday morning, local sources said.
Regime force intervened, firing rubber-coated steel bullets and tear gas canisters to break up the gathering. The area was then covered with a cloud of smoke, making several students start coughing and wheezing. A teenager was also shot in the face during the mayhem.
In another development, scores of regime forces raided the village of Nuwaidrat early on Wednesday, and violently broke into a number of buildings.
The soldiers arrested four local residents and took them away to an unknown location.
Thousands of anti-regime protesters have held numerous demonstrations in Bahrain on an almost daily basis ever since the popular uprising began in the country on February 14, 2011.
They are demanding that the Al Khalifah family relinquish power and let a just system representing all Bahrainis be established.
Manama has gone to great lengths to clamp down on dissent.
Scores of people have lost their lives and hundreds of others sustained injuries or got arrested as a result of the Al Khalifah regime’s crackdown on anti-regime activists.
Meanwhile, people took to the streets across Bahrain to express solidarity with prominent Shia cleric Sheikh Isa Qassim, whom the Al Khalifah regime has stripped of nationality and summoned to attend a court hearing.
The protesters converged outside the residence of the 79-year-old clergyman in the village of Diraz on Tuesday evening.
Bahraini authorities stripped Sheikh Qassim of his nationality on June 20, 2016. They later dissolved the Islamic Enlightenment Institution, founded by the cleric, in addition to the opposition al-Risala Islamic Association.
Additionally, dozens of people held a rally in the Sanabis village in the suburbs of Manama to express their resentment with the death sentences recently handed down to three pro-democracy campaigners.
On Monday, Bahrain’s Court of Cassation found Sami Mushaima, Abbas Jamil Tahir al-Sami’ and Ali Abdulshahid al-Singace guilty of killing a member of Emirati forces assisting Manama in its clampdown on Bahraini demonstrators in the northern village of al-Daih back in March 2014, and upheld death sentences against the trio.