The chances of a Bahrain policeman being held accountable are about as remote as England’s chances of winning the world cup. So the other day, no one really took the Ministry of the Interior seriously when they said they were investigating a case of a policeman throwing a Molotov cocktail at someone’s house. The MOI’s tweet came after a video circulated showing a policeman throwing two firebombs at a house in ‘one of the areas of Bahrain’.
The video, which began circulating on 7th June, is actually from at least 2012. The original apparently occured on 27th January 2012 in Salmabad. The MOI tweet simply refers to a fire bomb attack in ‘one of the areas of Bahrain’. Although the MOI does not provide a link to the video (why would it?), there appear to be no other recent video posted of a policeman throwing a Molotov cocktail at a house.
The MOI’s 2 year delay in investigating this case, as well as its subsequent failure to acknowledge that the video is actually 2 years old, is alarming. It highlights the fact that they are either wholly ignorant, or willfully blind to what’s going on in Bahrain. Of course I am betting it’s the latter. I have raised this point before though; given the volume of evidence showing police violence in Bahrain, why do they not have someone appointed to screen social media for such abuses? Clearly the MOI are aware of the problem yet choose to ignore it to protect their reputation. The bizarre alternative is that they are aware of all the cases but only tweet about a few – weird given their new commitment to transparency. Anyway, if the MOI are reading this, I compiled a blog a long time ago showing policemen throwing Molotov cocktails. As far as I am aware, they only launched an investigation into one of these cases.
Marc Owen Jones 
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