Hear no evil, see no evil – Regime deports British Journlists who dared to tell the truth after Grand Prix

Bahrain deports British journalists after Grand Prix
By Connie Agius, – 23 April, 2012- ABC News

Bahrain was hit by violent protests attempting to stop the F1 Grand Prix. Photo: Bahrain was hit by violent protests attempting to stop the F1 Grand Prix. (AFP)

Bahrain has deported a group of journalists and producers for Britain’s Channel 4 News after the controversial Formula One Grand Prix.

Bahrain’s government spent millions of dollars to host the global sporting event, hoping to show that normal life had returned to the Gulf kingdom after it cracked down on demonstrations last year.

But vivid TV images of masked youths hurling petrol bombs and police firing teargas cast a shadow over the event.

The protesters, mostly from the majority Shiite Muslim community, blame the Sunni ruling elite for shutting them out of opportunities, jobs and housing.

One protester died over the weekend in the Shiite village of Shakhura. Bahrain’s interior ministry called the death suspicious and said was under investigation.

The notion is that Formula One being brought here to Bahrain unites this nation. It’s a nonsense though because they’ve done nothing but the opposite.

The Channel 4 News crew were arrested while covering a series of protests after the completion of the race.

Britain’s foreign secretary William Hague expressed concern over the detention of the Channel 4 crew.

Bahrain’s foreign affairs minister Khalid Al Khalifa took to Twitter to say the crew had admitted to working without accreditation, that it was not acceptable, and the laws of the land should be respected.

Channel 4’s foreign affairs correspondent, Jonathan Miller, was one of those arrested.

He says the crew had been applying for accreditation for months, and had gone in as it did only because permission was repeatedly denied.

Mr Miller spent the day at the Grand Prix and then went out to the suburbs where the protests were.

“We started out thinking ‘where on Earth are the demonstrators?'” he said.

“I was saying to my driver – he’d been at the big demonstrations for the past two days and there have been people calling for democracy, tens of thousands of people on the streets – ‘where are they today of all days? This is meant to be the third of the three days of rage, where are they?'”

“[The driver] said, ‘look, they can’t get out. The police have stopped them.’ And we went to some of these neighbourhoods and we realised that the police were everywhere.

“There were armoured cars, there were police vehicles on every street corner. They were just, you know, the youths couldn’t move, they couldn’t get out of these neighbourhoods.” …more