© 2024
NPR for Northern Colorado
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Bahrain Detains Doctors Who Treated Protesters

MARY LOUISE KELLY, Host:

This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.

RENEE MONTAGNE, Host:

Bahrain has lifted the martial law it used to clamp down on protestors. Still, armored vehicles patrol the streets and hundreds remain in jail. Detainees include elected officials, opposition members and even doctors accused of treating protestors. NPR's Kelly McEvers reports.

KELLY MCEVERS: Unidentified Woman: We need to question you for a few hours, and then that's it.

MCEVERS: Family members drove the doctor to intelligence headquarters.

LOUISE KELLY: The guy who took him said just you can just wait outside. And then they waited for a very long time.

MCEVERS: Unidentified Woman: But he gave, like, a message, saying that, you know, he needs help.

MCEVERS: Unidentified Woman: Yeah.

MCEVERS: How?

LOUISE KELLY: I mean, it's just a code that we know, if anything happens.

MCEVERS: Unidentified Woman: Something like that. Yeah.

MCEVERS: Unidentified Woman: Why they don't punish the police who is after the protesters? Or the soldiers who killed the protesters on 18th of February? They were protesting peace.

MCEVERS: Unidentified Woman: One of the children keeps asking about his dad. We keep lying. We keep saying that he's in a long trip.

MCEVERS: The woman tells her story in a luxurious home overlooking a lush tropical garden and hand-tiled pool. The woman says while the protest movement started with poor, young, disenfranchised Shiites, cracking down on the upper middle class will only broaden the movement to include wealthy, secular professionals.

LOUISE KELLY: The officials and the government of Bahrain, they managed to create a fear among the merchants and the business community. I guess they're making a big mistake.

MCEVERS: Kelly McEvers, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

Kelly McEvers is a two-time Peabody Award-winning journalist and former host of NPR's flagship newsmagazine, All Things Considered. She spent much of her career as an international correspondent, reporting from Asia, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East. She is the creator and host of the acclaimed Embedded podcast, a documentary show that goes to hard places to make sense of the news. She began her career as a newspaper reporter in Chicago.