Manama: A Bahraini teenager was killed early on Saturday after a police car hit him in the Juffair area in the capital Manama.
Ali Yusuf Ali Hassan Ebrahim, 16 next month, died from the injuries he sustained after the police car crashed him into a wall. His family reportedly said that the car driver intentionally hit him at around 1am during a protest in the village.
However, the police said that the teenager died in an unfortunate accident after the car driver lost control from hitting a patch of oil poured by protestors in the village street.
Some of Bahrain's major highways have lately witnessed havoc during rush hour when young masked people poured oil across main roads and tied steel chains to streetlights to block traffic to press for the fulfilment of their demands. On some occasions, they set fire to tyres across the highways or roads to bring traffic to a standstill.
The police in its statement on Saturday did not mention whether the teenager was involved in blocking the road. His death, expectedly, further divided the Bahraini society along sectarian faults in a continuation of an unprecedented dramatic development.
Al Wefaq, the largest opposition society, and its supporters mourned Ali's death and blamed the authorities for it.
However, other Bahrainis said that while they regretted the loss of human life, they could not understand how a 16-year-old boy was away from his family in Sitra, his home town, at 1am and was confronting the police.
On all the other occasions when a teenager died, the nation and the international community have been invariably given by the opposition and the interior ministry two distinct versions about the reasons for the death.
Ali's death occurred four days before an international commission is due to deliver its report, expected to run in hundreds of pages, about the incidents that hit Bahrain in February and March and their consequences.
The report by the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry, headed by US-Egyptian professor M. Cherif Bassiouni, will be presented to King Hamad Bin Eisa Al Khalifa who on June 29 ordered the establishment of the high-profile commission. The report, initially scheduled to be delivered on October 30, but postponed by the panel to November 23, will also be posted in its entirety on the internet.
Nabeel Al Hamer, the media advisor to the king, on Saturday said that Bahrain would implement fully the recommendations of the report, regardless of their nature.
