Hawzah News Agency -A new documentary aired by Qatar-based Al-Jazeera Arabic channel has shed light on the secret relationship between Al Khalifa regime and Al Qaeda terror group.

The documentary entitled Those Who Play With Fire discloses recordings of talks between Bahraini intelligence officers and Al Qaeda members. The Bahraini officers had reportedly recruited Al Qaeda militants in 2003 to form secret cells and assassinate Bahrain’s Shia opposition figures, including Abdul Wahab Hussein, one of the founders of the biggest Shia opposition party Al-Wefaq, who had a prominent role in the anti-regime uprising in 1990s and 2011.  Abdul Wahab Hussein was handed down life imprisonment in 2012 and Al-Wefaq was finally dismantled in 2016 at the order of Bahrain’s Supreme Court.

Al-Jazeera documentary also discloses that Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa personally intervened to release one of the Al Qaeda leaders -Mohammed Saleh- who had been imprisoned by Saudi Arabia at the time of the agreement between the two sides.

According to the documentary, Manama also supported Jundullah and Ansar al-Furqan groups in Iran’s southeastern Sistan-Baluchestan province. Iran has designated both militant groups as terrorist entities. A classified video shows militant Hosham Baluchi, who confesses Bahraini intelligence officers traveled to Iran in 2006 and recruited him to carry out espionage and terror operations inside Iran. Baluchi was killed by Iranian security forces in 2015.

The Al Khalifa regime in Manama has furiously rejected the allegations in the documentary as “lies and fallacies”.