The Ministry of Interior of Bahrain announced that it has dissolved an organization accused of links to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), reported Agence France-Presse, quoted by BTA.
Forty-one people named as its members have been arrested, and the prosecutor's office is investigating cases related to espionage for a foreign country and expressed sympathy for the Iranian attacks.
Iran has carried out strikes on targets in Bahrain and other Arab states in the Persian Gulf, where the United States has military bases. The attacks followed the start of the war against Iran, launched by the United States and Israel on February 28, Reuters notes.
Earlier, the London-based human rights organization Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy said that the authorities had detained "some of the most important Shiite figures in the country".
The organization described the police operation as "unprecedented" and pointed out that a similar scale of repression had not been seen even during the protests in 2011. Then, in the context of the Arab Spring, Bahrain was shaken by mass demonstrations, with the ruling Sunni dynasty accusing Iran of supporting the protesters. Tehran has denied the accusations.
The current conflict in the Middle East has once again heightened tensions in Bahrain, where a Sunni dynasty rules and the majority population is Shiite and has complained of discrimination and marginalization for years, AFP notes.
According to the human rights organization "Human Rights Watch", dozens of people have been arrested in Bahrain for expressing support for Iran. Some of them have been convicted of treason, and 69 people have been stripped of their citizenship.