Shia wanted over Saudi protests surrenders: Police
2 February, 2014 – ABNA
A Saudi man wanted in connection with peaceful protests in 2011 among the Shia Muslim minority in the conservative, Sunni-majority kingdom has handed himself in, police said on Sunday.
Musa Jaafar Mohammed al-Mabyuq surrendered to police in the mostly Shia district of Qatif, in Eastern Province, a police spokesman said in a statement carried by the official SPA news agency.
Mabyuq “will be dealt with according to legal procedures,” the unnamed spokesman said, praising “the constructive role of his family” in the surrender, without giving further details or saying when he had given himself up to the authorities.
The unrest in Eastern Province started after an outbreak of violence between Shia pilgrims and religious police in the Muslim holy city of Medina, in western Saudi Arabia, in February 2011.
The protests escalated when Riyadh led a force of Gulf troops into neighbouring Bahrain the following month to help crush Shia-led pro-democracy demonstrations in the tiny Sunni-ruled Gulf kingdom.
Eastern Province is home to most of the kingdom’s two million Shias, who represent 10 percent of the Saudi population. …more