Some 170 charged in Bahrain with forming Hezbollah-inspired group

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Bahrain’s attorney general charges nearly 170 people on Tuesday with forming a Shiite organization named for Lebanon’s famed terrorist group Hezbollah.

The small but strategic Gulf Arab kingdom has been dogged by persistent low-level violence since 2011, when its Sunni minority rulers bloodily suppressed Shiite-led protests for a constitutional monarchy with an elected prime minister.

The authorities have repeatedly accused Shiite Iran and its allies, including Hezbollah, of fomenting the unrest. Iran denies the charge.

Attorney general Ahmad al-Hamadi says 169 people, 111 of whom are in custody, will be tried for “forming a terrorist organization… under the name Bahrain Hezbollah” in collaboration with the Iranian intelligence services.

Hamadi doesn’t specify when the trial would open or when the defendants had been arrested.

But he says some of them were accused of traveling abroad to receive training in weapons and explosives from Iran and its regional allies.

Analysts have expressed skepticism about previous Bahraini allegations of Iranian and Hezbollah involvement.

Hezbollah is one of the best trained and equipped terrorist groups in the world, while most of the Bahrain violence has consisted of throwing stones and firebombs at police patrols or planting crude pipe bombs.

— AFP