Bahrain released on Saturday an opposition leader who was jailed more than four years for involvement in anti-government protests.
The Waed secular group said on its official Twitter account that party chief Ibrahim Sharif was freed at dawn.
Sharif had played a prominent role in the month-long protests and was later among a group of 20 activists tried for plotting to overthrow Bahrain’s rulers.
In June 2011, eight Shiite activists were jailed for life, and the rest for two to 15 years. Sharif, a Sunni, received a five-year sentence.
Sharif’s release comes four days after a Bahrain court jailed prominent Shiite opposition leader Ali Salman for four years for inciting disobedience and hatred in the kingdom.
Salman heads the Al Wefaq Shiite political association, one of the key forces behind the 2011 protests demanding reforms in Bahrain.
*Agence France-Presse
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Gertrude Bell's life in focus
A feature film
At one point, two feature films were in the works, but only German director Werner Herzog’s project starring Nicole Kidman would be made. While there were high hopes he would do a worthy job of directing the biopic, when Queen of the Desert arrived in 2015 it was a disappointment. Critics panned the film, in which Herzog largely glossed over Bell’s political work in favour of her ill-fated romances.
A documentary
A project that did do justice to Bell arrived the next year: Sabine Krayenbuhl and Zeva Oelbaum’s Letters from Baghdad: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Gertrude Bell. Drawing on more than 1,000 pieces of archival footage, 1,700 documents and 1,600 letters, the filmmakers painstakingly pieced together a compelling narrative that managed to convey both the depth of Bell’s experience and her tortured love life.
Books, letters and archives
Two biographies have been written about Bell, and both are worth reading: Georgina Howell’s 2006 book Queen of the Desert and Janet Wallach’s 1996 effort Desert Queen. Bell published several books documenting her travels and there are also several volumes of her letters, although they are hard to find in print. Original documents are housed at the Gertrude Bell Archive at the University of Newcastle, which has an online catalogue.
