LONDON: When a Bahraini hospital started to take in casualties from the violent crackdown on protesters earlier this year, Rula al-Saffar was one of the first to volunteer. As a medical professor and president of the Bahraini Nursing Society, she was not on the staff of the overwhelmed Salmaniya hospital. But doctors needed all the help they could get.

Saffar could not have known at the time that in stepping in to help save lives she was endangering her own. Within weeks she would be arrested, charged, convicted in a trial lasting minutes and sentenced to 15 years in prison, along with 19 other hospital medics. Now she waits at home in Manama, an imminent appeal case her last chance for justice.

The authorities say that the doctors at the Salmaniya hospital abetted the uprising that shook the kingdom in February and March. But in an interview, Saffar says her six-month ordeal, which will culminate in an appeal hearing that starts on Sunday, has been a judicial farce.

Saffar was arrested on 4 April after receiving a late-night phone call ordering her to present herself to Bahrain’s Central Investigation Department for interrogation. “The minute I entered they just closed the gate, and suddenly I was blindfolded, handcuffed and started being pushed and cussed at the whole time.

“I never knew why was I there. And then this woman started shouting at me, that you hate the system, that you were a protester against the system, against the king.

“I kept saying: ‘No, this is not what happened,’ and of course the minute you say no they beat you up and they electrocute you ... And I thought: ‘How dare you do this?’ Interrogation ... as you see in a democratic country, I thought my country had the same thing, where you have a right for your lawyer, they read your warrant. But this is not what happened to us.”

Saffar spent five months in custody, enduring beatings, torture, sexual assault and threats of rape, before she was bailed in late August. On Sunday, Saffar and 19 other medics and paramedics will appeal against convictions - and sentences ranging between five and 20 years - that have been condemned by governments and medical associations around the world.—Dawn/Guardian News Service