Leading medic resigns in Bahrain protest

A LEADING medic has resigned his fellowship of the country’s largest postgraduate medical institution in protest at its failure to condemn the detention and torture of nurses and doctors in Bahrain.

Professor Eoin O’Brien, former president of the Irish Heart Foundation&, said he believes he is the first fellow to resign “in principle” from the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland.

The professor of molecular pharmacology at the Conway Institute of Biomolecular & Biomedical Research in University College Dublin mailed his resignation on Wednesday.

Prof O’Brien said he had done so “because there comes a time when you have to stand up for moral issues and we cannot have doctors and nurses tortured in the course of duty”.

He said the situation in Bahrain where doctors and nurses treating pro-democracy supporters are being arrested, detained and tortured was likely to “go badly wrong” and that “the colleges — the RCPI and the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland (RCSI) — by keeping silent, will be almost complicit”.

Among the detainees are a number of Irish medics trained by the RCSI who have previously worked in Irish hospitals.

They include married father Dr Ali Essa Al Ekri who holds an RCSI degree and who trained at Temple St Children’s Hospital between 2000 and 2002, where he specialised in paediatric orthopaedic surgery. His third child was born in the Rotunda in Dublin.

A second detainee, Dr Bassim Dhaif, completed a fellowship in general surgery and orthopaedic surgery provided by the RCSI and worked between 1993 and 1997 at the Mater, Temple Street and Cappagh.

His brother, Ghassan Dhaif, who trained in Ireland as a dentist, was also arrested and detained as part of a military crackdown against pro- democracy protests that have formed apart of the “Arab Spring”.

The crackdown was ordered by the royal rulers of the former emirate.

Dr Al Ekri was working at the Salmaniya Medical Centre treating people injured in the protests at the time of his arrest.

The RCSI, which has a €60 million medical campus in Bahrain, has come in for sustained criticism for failing publicly to condemn the arrests.

The RCPI has also failed to do so.