Bahrain hires British ex-top cop for reforms

LONDON: Bahrain has hired John Yates, who resigned from his senior post at London's Metropolitan Police Service earlier this year over a newspaper phone hacking scandal, to oversee reform of the Gulf Arab state's police force, the Daily Telegraph reported on Saturday.

Bahrain appointed the former Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, the force's top counter-terrorism officer, after an independent inquiry found evidence of systematic rights abuses during a crackdown on pro-democracy protests earlier this year.

"Bahrain's police have some big challenges ahead, not dissimilar to those the UK itself faced only a couple of decades ago," Yates was quoted by the paper as saying.