King declares state of emergency

The king, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, declared a State of National Safety on March 15th, imposing martial law for three months. A group of pro-government members of parliament (MPs) had called on the king to introduce martial law, citing "an unprecedented disruption of security and hostile sectarian polarisation at health and educational institutions" and "orchestrated acts to disrupt the traffic on Bahrain's main highways", according to the official Bahrain News Agency.

The government has also banned reporting on actions taken by the security forces. Hundreds of political activists and suspected activists had been arrested by mid-April, often taken from their homes violently in the middle of the night and brought to secret locations. These included the leaders of two hardline opposition groups that had called for the overthrow of the monarchy, Hassan Mushaima of Haq and Abdelwahhab Hussain of al-Wafa. They also included Ebrahim Sharif, the head of Waad, a legally recognised, secular, liberal political society that has campaigned against sectarianism and corruption and that has always opposed violence. Mr Sharif, a former investment banker, was taken from his home in the early hours of the morning by 40 masked men. Neither his family nor his lawyers were informed of his whereabouts. The authorities also revoked the licence of a telecommunications company in which he was a shareholder, 2Connect. Subsequently, the Waad's licence to operate was suspended, its headquarters were raided and its deputy leader arrested. The authorities said that he had broken the law by publishing an article that criticised some of the security forces' actions, breaking the ban on reporting on these. At least three well-known bloggers, Mahmood al-Yousif, Redbelt and Emoodz, were detained temporarily. Rather than seeking to isolate the more hardline opposition activists, the government appears to be using its opportunity to crack down on a wide range of critics, regardless of their views or their record on violence or revolution.

By early April four detainees had died in custody, including a Shia businessman and bookstore owner, Abdul-Kareem Fakhrawi, whose relatives said that he had disappeared after going to the police to complain about a raid on his home, and who was later found in a morgue. The authorities said that the detainees had died because of pre-existing medical conditions, but human rights groups reported signs of torture. The vice-president of the banned Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, Nabeel Rajab, was summoned to the military prosecutor for questioning after posting a photo on Twitter and Facebook that appeared to show the body of one of the detainees, Ali Isa Saqer, with marks of torture. (The authorities said that the photo was fabricated, although it was very similar to one published by AFP, a French news agency, and a visiting observer from US-based Human Rights Watch reported seeing possible signs of torture on the body.)

The Ministry of the Interior said that it found three shotguns and Molotov cocktail equipment at a Shia mosque in the village of Malkiya. There were also reported firebomb attacks on the house of Munira Fakhro, Bahrain's most prominent female academic, who had stood as a Waad candidate in the October parliamentary election, and on the house of Jawad Fairooz, a former MP for al-Wefaq, the main Shia-supported political society.