(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - Zainab al-Khawaja was taken to hospital on Sunday after seven days of hunger strike following the arrest of her father and brother.
The 27-year-old had his father, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja -- a prominent Bahraini opposition figure -- and husband Mohammed al-Masqati violently being taken away by the forces.
According to the family members and human rights activists, on April 9, masked officers burst into al-Khawaja's home and assaulted her father and husband.
Zainab has refused to eat anything since last week and was complaining of extreme pains, said a member of the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights. "She had low pulse and had to be hospitalized."
"If my father is going to be killed, I want to die as well," she said in a recent interview. "I would rather die with dignity than live as a slave to the Al Khalifa regime," the 27-year-old noted in reference to the royal family, which has been ruling the Persian Gulf island for more than 40 years.
Scores of people have been killed and many more injured since February 14, when the public started a popular revolution against the royal family.
Led by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain's Arab neighbors from the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council deployed troops to the country in mid-March to reinforce brutal armed attacks against anti-government protesters. The reinforcements have reportedly contributed to a major hike in the use of extreme violence against popular protests.
Khawaja wrote an open letter to US President Barak Obama to pressure Manama into releasing her father before staging the hunger strike.
Washington, however, has remained silent over the recent bloodshed.
“People in Bahrain think that the US is in one way or another directly complicit in what's happening in Bahrain,” Maryam al-Khawaja, Zainab's sister told Press TV.
She went on to say that Washington's complicity with Bahrain's state violence was shown in remarks made by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had “actually said that Bahrain has the sovereign right to invite the [P]GCC troops into the country.”
“But legally and according to the agreement between the [P]GCC countries, these forces are supposed to be used for foreign threats,” she emphasized.
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