Growing Number of People join in Solidarity with Abdulhadi AlKhawaja”freedom or death” Strike

Dozens join Bahrain hunger strike
26 March, 2012 – Al Akhbar

Dozens of Bahrainis are beginning a hunger strike on Monday in solidarity with human rights leader Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja, who has now gone 46 days without food.

The protest will begin with a march in the capital Manama, with activists planning to walk silently through the streets to highlight the lack of international media coverage.

Afterwards activists will publicly pledge to refuse food to highlight Al-Khawaja’s plight.

Al-Khawaja, also a Danish citizen and founder of the Gulf Center for Human Rights, was sentenced to life in prison in June 2011 for organizing peaceful protests calling for democratic reform in the tiny Gulf state.

Said Yousif, deputy head of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights (BCHR), said organizers were expecting around 50 people to participate in open-ended hunger strikes.

“It will be a call to the international community and the UN and the Danish government to save him, and ask for his urgent release before he dies,” he said.

The BCHR on Monday produced a report documenting continued human rights abuses committed by Bahraini security forces since a government-commissioned human rights report in November last year.

At least 31 people have been killed since the government-funded Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry highlighted systematic methods of abuse deployed by security forces, the report said.

Twenty of those recently killed, BCHR claimed, were due to suffocation from excessive use of tear gas.

Victims are often placed in isolated detention centers, where they are tortured and beaten without access to medical care, the report said. …more