Bahraini human rights defender sentenced five years over a tweet

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Lookout published a security research report on a malware espionage campaign that steals hundreds of gigabytes of data via mobile devices. The program, which was running since 2012 and has adversely impacted thousands of people in more than 20 countries, was tracked to a building owned by the Lebanese intelligence agency. In response to the report, a number of Lebanese human rights organisations called upon the General Prosecutor to investigate the allegedly secret large-scale surveillance. Mr Abbas Ibrahim, Director General of General Directorate of General Security, said ‘the General Security does not have these type of capabilities. We wish we had these capabilities.’Nabeel Rajab, a human rights defender and the president of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, received a new five-year jail term for expressing his opinion online. Rajab is already serving a two-year sentence for criticising the Bahraini authorities in TV interviews. The new charges, however, are related to Rajab’s tweets in 2015 that denounced alleged torture in Bahrain prison Jaw and  killing of Yemeni civilians by the Saudi-led coalition. The sentence was backlashed by local and international human rights organisations seeing it as a flagrant infringement of freedom of expression and a clampdown on dissenting voices.