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. Members of the kingdom's Shia Muslim majority have staged numerous demonstrations against alleged discrimination by their Sunni rulers.
The tiny island state was the target of international criticism for imposing martial law during a violent crackdown on protests. The Bahraini government said earlier this week it planned to hire John Timoney, a former police chief in the US state of Florida, as part of a reform drive it says is aimed at protecting rights and freedoms while enforcing order. Bahrain has said it will comply with the findings of the inquiry and plans to develop a code of conduct for police. It is under pressure from its ally the United States to improve its rights record in order to secure an arms sale.
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