JNN  06 Apr 2013 Manama : Dr. Fatima Haji A female Bahraini doctor says the Al Khalifa regime forces have ‘severely’ tortured her and several other doctors, who treated injured anti-regime protesters, in order to extract false confessions. 

A Bahrain appeals court convicted nine medics on Thursday for their role in last year’s pro-democracy uprising, and acquitted nine others, in a controversial case that has drawn international criticism of the U.S.-allied Gulf Arab state. Dr Fatima Haji was acquitted of the charges she faced.

She explained that she was arrested from her own apartment along with 19 other doctors who disappeared from their homes, hospitals and operating theatres.

“We were forced to sign false confession blindly without reading them and these confessions were taken or extracted by severe torture and I mean by severe torture physical and psychological torture,” Dr. Fatima Haji said in a recent interview .

“We’d been denied sleep for days and had been standing for days. We were not given food or fluids and were hardly allowed to go the toilet,” Haji stated.

She further said the inmates were beaten by wooden sticks and hollow pipes. They were also electrocuted, sexually harassed and threatened with death and rape.

Haji is one of a group of doctors who were sentenced to five years in jail for their role in anti-regime protests. However, they were acquitted in 2012.

The confession they were forced to sign said that they were in possession of arms in the hospital where they worked and that they were trying to topple the Manama regime.

At the beginning of her ordeal Fatima did not know what her charges were, but found herself at a military court where they read out charges that had been fabricated against her that she had stolen 100 bags of blood, which she gave to protesters so that they could spill it on themselves, so that it looked as if they had been assaulted by police.

The Bahraini uprising began in mid-February 2011, when the people, inspired by the popular revolutions that toppled the dictators of Tunisia and Egypt, started holding massive demonstrations.

The Manama regime launched a brutal crackdown on the peaceful protests and called in Saudi-led Arab forces from neighboring states.

Dozens of people have been killed in the crackdown, and the security forces have arrested hundreds, including doctors and nurses accused of treating the injured.

Bahrainis say they will continue holding demonstrations until their demand for the establishment of a democratically elected government is met.

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