Prominent activist Maryam al-Khawaja flashes the victory sign as she leaves the court building in Manama yesterday.

AFP/Manama

A Bahrain court lifted yesterday a travel ban on a prominent activist charged with assaulting airport police as she flew in to try to visit her jailed father, a judicial source said.

Maryam al-Khawaja has been a vocal critic of the Bahrain authorities’ crackdown on 2011 protests that led to her father Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, an opposition leader, being jailed for life.

She was arrested on arrival at the airport on August 30 and charged with assaulting two policewomen.

She denies the charge, which carries a penalty of up to five years in prison, and counters that she was attacked by police.

The travel ban was imposed when she was granted bail on September 18. 

The court accepted her lawyer’s request that it be lifted taking into consideration her work commitments abroad, the judicial source said.  

Khawaja, who heads the Beirut-based Gulf Centre for Human Rights and—like her father—has Danish citizenship, has been a familiar figure in Washington, regularly meeting members of Congress and administration officials.

In 2011, she testified as a witness at a congressional hearing on Bahrain.

Her father was jailed for life following Shia-led protests that year against the authorities.

*Police yesterday detained prominent rights activist Nabil Rajab after questioning him over remarks posted on Twitter deemed offensive to the security forces, the interior ministry said.

Rajab acknowledged during questioning that he was responsible for the remarks posted on his Twitter account, and “legal measures have been taken to refer him to the general prosecution”, a ministry statement said.

It said Rajab “insulted official bodies in his tweets”. 

In one tweet posted on Sunday, Rajab charged that Bahrainis allegedly joining Islamist extremists in Syria were originally members of the kingdom’s security forces.

“Many #Bahrain men who joined #terrorism & #ISIS came from security institutions and those institutions were the first ideological incubator,” he wrote, referring to one acronym for the Islamic State militant group.

 

 

 

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