Chief investigator blasts Bahraini government

The head of the Bahraini independent commission which criticised the Bahraini authorities for using "excessive force" against protesters stated his support for those criticising the government's investigations into the crackdown as a "whitewash". Egyptian lawyer Mahmoud Cherif Bassiouni, who led the body the published a 500-page report detailing abuses during the protests, told his university's American television channel that there would have to be "major economic, political and constitutional reforms." "I think the public is going to come out in the end and say 'you know what? You're holding all these investigations behind closed doors. This is a whitewash...you have to choose between maintaining the unity of the family or the regime, or the unity of the country," said Bassiouni. Protests are continuing in the Gulf state- and so are security force tactics which have been widely condemned by human rights activists. Maryam Alkhwaja of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR) wrote on Twitter yesterday that she was waiting to see whether three recent deaths would be attributed by doctors to "regime violence". If they were, she said, it would mean "the highest number of deaths in one month since March 2011."