Bahrain’s chief prosecutor has formally accused the Iranian military of training opposition fighters to conduct attacks inside the Gulf kingdom, after Manama announced earlier this week that it had seized a boat trying to smuggle explosives from Iran and Syria into the country.
Chief prosecutor Osama al-Oufi said the intelligence service reported last month that “Bahraini Ahmed Mahfuz Moussawi, currently living in Iran, had planned terrorist bombing operations targeting institutions and places vital to the sovereignty and security of the kingdom.” “He is also accused of jeopardising the safety and security of the kingdom, injuring persons, terrorising citizens and residents, disturbing public peace, spreading chaos, and preventing government institutions and authorities from performing their functions,” the statement said.
Last Monday Bahraini authorities revealed that they had seized a boat smuggling explosives.
The boat, which had two Bahrainis aboard, was stopped over the weekend at two nautical miles (3.7 kilometres) off the archipelago’s coast, public security chief Major-General Tareq al-Hasan said. He said it had been tracked over a distance of 118 nautical miles (218 kilometres) northeast of the kingdom. “Fifty hand grenades made in Iran,” as well as “295 fuses connected to switches labelled as made in Syria,” were found in the 29-foot (nine-metre) vessel, he said in a statement carried by state news agency BNA.
Washington Institute Executive Director Robert Satloff compared the incident to the capture of the Karine A, a ship that the Israeli military intercepted in 2002 carrying fifty tons of weapons from Iran and its Lebanese terror proxy Hezbollah bound for the Palestinian Authority. Gulf nations have in recent months grown increasingly forceful in emphasizing and condemning Iranian efforts to destabilize Arab governments, and Bahrain specifically has blasted Tehran for fomenting terrorism inside its borders. Those nations have for years demanded action to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons; an achievement that they fear would insulate the Islamic republic as it pressed its regional territorial claims. United Arab Emirates Ambassador to the United States Yousef al-Otaiba argued for military action to degrade Iran’s nuclear program as early as 2010, and two years earlier the Saudis had already demanded, per American diplomatic cables, that Washington “cut off the head of the snake”
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