Two jailed Bahraini human rights activists â€" a father and daughter â€" have gone on a hunger strike and their medical conditions are worsening, according to a family member and a rights group.
Abdulhadi al-Khawaja and his daughter Zainab started their hunger strike last week after being denied family visitation rights, but they recently began to take water as their conditions worsened.
In an interview with the Huffington Post, Maryam al-Khawaja, the other daughter of Mr. Khawaja, and Zainab’s sister, said the last news her family heard was on Tuesday, when they found out that Mr. Khawaja’s health had deteriorated and another jailed relative convinced him to drink some water. She also said that Zainab had begun coughing up blood, and she had taken a small amount of water as well.
Maryam, who criticized the United States and Britain for their support of the Bahraini government, said that the authorities had not given her sister medical treatment, but had instead sent an officer to videotape her in her jail cell.
The Bahrain Center for Human Rights said in a statement on Sunday that the two are also refusing to wear prison uniforms. Fatima Haji, an internal medicine specialist, said of Zainab:
Her family reported that she sounded fatigued, said she was suffering loss of memory and concentration. Having initiated a dry hunger strike now, including no intake of glucose, will put her at high risk of sudden onset arrhythmias, loss of consciousness and possibly death especially that she is in a detention center where no cardiac monitor or cardiac resuscitation service is available.
Zainab, who has charted the protest movement on her @AngryArabiya Twitter feed, wrote a letter from jail that was posted on the blog of New York Times Op-Ed columnist Nicholas Kristof:
When I was placed in a cell with fourteen people â€" including two convicted murderers â€" and I was handed orange prison clothes, I knew I couldn’t put them on without having to swallow a little bit of my dignity. Not wearing the convicts’ clothes, because I have committed no crime, that became my small act of civil disobedience. Not letting me see my family and my three-year-old daughter, that has been their punishment. That is why I am on hunger strike.
Mr. Khawaja, who has been on hunger strike before, along with other dissidents are in prison on charges related to their participation in an uprising against the ruling monarchy that began in February 2011.
A request for comment from the Bahrain government was not immediately available on Wednesday. But the Ministry of Interior had said visitations were denied to prisoners for refusing to wear uniforms.
A “Free Zainab†campaign was started on Twitter in another sign of the attention the uprising and activists in Bahrain have drawn. There has also been renewed criticism of the United States for its support of Bahrain, which is the regional base for an American naval fleet.
Follow Christine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.
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