Editor Silenced, With the Help of Unreliable Sources

Having returned to Bahrain a decade ago at the personal invitation of King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, he enjoyed a certain degree of immunity from government pressures, even when the prosperous, independent newspaper he started, Al Wasat, made things uncomfortable for a minister or two.

In the last two months of rising tensions and violence, his was a voice of moderation, urging both the Sunni royal family and leaders of the predominantly Shiite protest movement to sit down and compromise. He wrote columns criticizing government repression and corruption, and others condemning moves by protesters to march on the royal palace and barricade the country’s main highway — acts that eventually provoked a sweeping crackdown over the last three weeks.

But suddenly, Mr. Jamri found himself out of a job, forced to quit last weekend to keep Al Wasat open. He now spends his days clearing out his office and preparing to face prosecutors on Monday. They have accused him of publishing false stories to incite Shiites to rise up against the government.

“They have taken away my baby,” said Mr. Jamri, who says the false stories were planted. “When they touch and attack Al Wasat, it is a message to everybody that there is a new Bahrain. They are re-engineering the country.”

Speaking out extensively for the first time since his arrest, he said on Friday that he did not want to consider what could happen to him next. In an interview conducted in part in a car as his wife nervously drove around the city trying to avoid military roadblocks, he said he received threatening text messages every day, and when he called back he was greeted with taunts inflected with mock Shiite slang expressions.

Mr. Jamri is the mild-mannered son of the late Sheik Abdul-Amir al-Jamri, once a fiery Shiite protest leader whose photograph is still hung prominently in the meeting rooms of Shiite activists. But Mr. Jamri, now 49, took a different path from his father. He became a mechanical engineer and made the rare personal choice of marrying a Sunni woman of Western tastes who is also a journalist. Continued…