Bahrain Mirror: Human Rights Watch condemned on Wednesday (February 21, 2018) the court ruling issued against prominent Bahraini activist Nabeel Rajab sentencing him to an additional five years in prison.

"The new prison sentence for Nabeel Rajab is only the latest chapter in years of persecution and efforts to silence an activist solely for his efforts to sound the alarm on human rights abuses," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. "Rajab should never have faced such charges or spent one day in prison for them."

The new sentence is based on Rajab's tweets on the Saudi-led military operations in Yemen, which have killed thousands of civilians, and on alleged torture in Jaw Prison.

The new sentence is in addition to the two-year sentence that Rajab is already serving on other charges related to criticism of the Bahraini security forces' indoctrination of their personnel with an extremist ideology.

Arabic Version