Bahraini convicts in Qatar spy case lose their appeals

The Cassation Court, Bahrain’s highest court, upheld the verdicts previously issued against two Bahraini men who were found guilty of receiving funds from a Qatari minister to disrupt the parliamentary elections here last November. With this, the pair exhausted all the judicial options to avoid jail and now will serve their prison terms.

The first defendant was earlier ordered to be imprisoned to five years and was fined BD2,000, while the second defendant was sentenced to three years of imprisonment and fined BD1,000. As reported earlier by Tribune, the first defendant was a candidate in the parliamentary elections here. Court files show that a total of undeclared BD12,500 was found in the suspects’ possession upon their arrival to the Kingdom, coming from Qatar through Kuwait last October.

Investigations revealed that both suspects often received money from the former Qatari Interior Minister Abdullah bin Khalid Al Thani through their bank accounts or by frequently travelling to Qatar to receive the cash in person, a similar scenario to the trip they have made when they were arrested. It was also shown in the court that the first defendant received sums of money from the Qatari official to support his electoral campaign for the 2018 parliamentary elections.

The man received the money with the aim of winning the polls and serve the malicious Qatari agenda to harm the Kingdom’s interests by affecting the work of the legislative institutions in Bahrain from inside the parliament. Both defendants were arrested at Bahrain International Airport, where the Customs Department employees searched them and found the money in their possession. There, the first defendant denied that he was attempting to hide the BD12,000 that was found in his possession, claiming that he “forgot” to declare it.

He also denied that he received the money from the Qatari official to support his electoral campaign, claiming that it was given to him “to fix rainwater insolation equipment”. A judicial permission was previously issued to record telephone calls between the suspects, which confirmed the results of the investigations and led to their arrest.

Further probe and interrogation of the suspects also showed that both of them, in the period between the years 2013-2018, received a total of BD235,804 from the same Qatari official, who’s listed in an international terrorism list issued by the Anti-Terror Arab Quartet, which consists of Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. 

Both suspects were found guilty for the charges of exchanging intelligence information with someone working for a foreign country to undermine the national interests, in addition to illegally receiving money without claiming it at the Customs Department.