MANAMA: Bahraini police firing shot guns and tear gas crushed a month-old pro-democracy sit-in on Wednesday, leaving three protesters dead according to the opposition and sparking Shiite outrage across the region.
Hundreds of riot police backed by tanks and helicopters assaulted demonstrators in Manama's Pearl Square in the early morning, clearing the symbolic heart of the uprising in the strategic Gulf kingdom.
Bahrain's Shiite opposition said three protesters were killed in the raid, which was backed by tanks and helicopters, while the government said two police were killed in hit-and-run attacks by opposition drivers.
"We now have three martyrs," Khalil Marzouk, deputy head of the Al-Wefaq movement and a member of parliament, told AFP, adding that the situation was "catastrophic" with hospitals closed off and Shiite villages surrounded.
The violence came a day after King Hamad, supported by armed forces which have arrived in the tiny island state from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, declared a three-month state of emergency.
Police and troops fanned out across the city where protests and gatherings were banned and a dusk-to-dawn curfew was slapped on the business district which had been under the protesters control for three days.
Shiite villages around the city remained cut off by the security forces and phone lines were down. A curfew was announced in central Manama from 4:00 pm to 4:00 am and protests were banned.
Human rights activists said medics seeking to tend to wounded Shiites had been beaten by police, injured people had been left untreated and police were blocking access to hospitals.
Police arrived at Pearl Square in tanks and buses early Wednesday before moving in on the mainly Shiite Muslim demonstrators, who had been camped out for a month in the square.
Thick clouds of back smoke mixed with tear gas over the area as the protesters' tents were set on fire. Explosions believed to be caused by cooking gas canisters also shook the area.
As helicopters hovered overhead, troops then entered the nearby financial centre to clear it of illegal roadblocks and the handfuls of protesters still remaining after clashes there on Sunday injured more than 200 people.
Shots were heard as troops escorted a bulldozer into the Financial Harbour business complex, the centre of a regional finance hub that hosts major international banks and multinational corporations.
The protesters are demanding reform from the Sunni dynasty that has ruled the strategic archipelago -- a US ally and home of the US Fifth Fleet -- for more than 200 years.
Opposition chief Sheikh Ali Salman said the US-backed, Sunni Muslim regime was acting like Libyan strongman Moamer Kadhafi and using "extreme brutality" against ordinary people.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad condemned the intervention of Saudi-led forces to prop up the Al-Khalifa royal family as "foul and doomed," as the upheaval dragged in regional rivals and the United States.
"The US seeks to save the Zionist regime (Israel) and to smother the popular movements. And that is why it supports certain governments," the leader of Shiite-dominated Iran said after a cabinet meeting.
Shiite leaders in Iraq as well as the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon also expressed outrage. Basheer al-Najafi, one of Iraq's leading Shiite authorities, accused Bahrain of targeting peaceful villages with "gunfire and mortars." British Prime Minister David Cameron personally urged King Hamad, of the Al-Khalifa dynasty which has ruled for 230 years, to respond to the protests with "reform, not repression", his spokesman said.
Cameron spoke by phone to the king late Tuesday, he said.
Around 16 people have been killed since the protests started in Pearl Square last month, as mainly Shiite activists took to the streets emboldened by revolts that toppled autocratic regimes in Tunisia and Egypt.
The unrest has sparked unease in Saudi Arabia and has put the United States in the difficult position -- now familiar after the unrest sweeping the Arab world -- of having to stand by a regional ally while backing democratic change.
Washington has not directly criticised the intervention of Saudi Arabia or called for the Gulf forces to withdraw.
The United Nations and the European Union have called for restraint, while Britain has closed its embassy in Manama and advised against all travel to the kingdom.
Human Rights Watch deputy Middle East director Joe Stork said the state of emergency gave the security forces broad powers to subdue unrest but did not give King Hamad's regime a "blank cheque to commit abuses."
"The world is watching to see whether Bahrain will respect the basic rights of all its citizens," he said in a statement.
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