The protesters held up posters of the senior cleric, who was placed under house arrest last May following a bloody police raid on his residence in Diraz.
Residents in the northwestern Bahraini village of Diraz took to the streets on Friday in show of solidarity with Bahrain’s highest religious authority Sheikh Isa Qassim.
Those who took part in the peaceful gathering also voiced their condemnation of the continuing ban on Friday prayers at Diraz’s Imam Al-Sadiq Mosque, which use to host the largest Shiite congregation in Bahrain.
The kingdom’s security forces enforced the ban, which has been in place since June 2016, by deploying armored vehicles while placing concrete barricades and police checkpoints across the village.
The introduction of the ban came shortly after Sheikh Qassim was stripped of his citizenship for speaking out against the regime in Manama. Since then, Diraz’s 30,000 residents have been subjected to an unprecedented lockdown in what rights groups describe as collective punishment.
(ABNA)
