After months of secret plans that involved disguises, code names and a body double, a prominent blogger who had been sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison for his activism in Bahrain has fled the country by hiding in a compartment in a car, according to media reports and human rights groups.
On Friday, The Atlantic published an account of elaborate plans to help the blogger, Ali Abdulemam, to escape. The narrative, written by Thor Halvorssen, the president of the Human Rights Foundation, detailed the roles the foundation and others planned to play to whisk Mr. Abdulemam out of Bahrain.
We were hoping to sneak Abdulemam out of the country in plain view and with the cooperation of his would-be captors. Meanwhile, a look-alike would stay behind with me in Bahrain, and we would leave on a commercial airliner with a duplicate passport.
The plan was suddenly aborted when the blogger was given an unrelated, surprise opportunity to hide in a car. He was then taken over the border into Saudi Arabia, and eventually made his way to Europe, Mr. Halvorssen
wrote.
After several arrests over the years, Mr. Abdulemam had gone into hiding and in 2011 was sentenced in absentia, along with other activists, to 15 years behind bars for their work seeking political change in Bahrain.
A response from the Bahraini government to e-mailed questions on Friday about its reaction to the reports that he had fled the country, and its views on other details about Mr. Abdulemam’s activities, was not immediately available.
But after one of his previous arrests in 2010, the Ministry of the Interior in Bahrain said, “Any assumption that Mr. Abdulemam has been arrested purely on the basis of any political views he may hold is entirely inaccurate and is connected solely to evidence of his involvement with senior members of the terrorist network.”
In 2006, my colleague Neil MacFarquhar profiled Mr. Abdulemam as part of a broader piece in The Times that also looked at how activism on the Internet was taking on the ruling elite in the Gulf kingdom. It focused on how the establishment of Mr. Abdulemam’s groundbreaking Web site, BahrainOnline.org, was intended to give Bahrainis a place to share ideas and develop plans to deepen political change.
Mr. Abdulemam, who has since sought political asylum in Britain, is scheduled to be a speaker at the Oslo Freedom Forum starting Monday next week in Norway.
Excerpts from the account in The Atlantic reveal an ambitious plan by the Human Rights Foundation and others to help Mr. Abdulemam secretly leave Bahrain.
In the end, the most outlandish plan was the one approved by a member of the Denmark’s Jaeger Corps, the elite Special Forces unit who volunteered to consult on the project. Over dinner in New York, the Jaeger Corpsman agreed with a plan in which the Bahrainis themselves would serve an unknowing role in Abdulemam’s escape. We would try to find a way in which the monarchy’s authorities would treat our rescue team as V.I.P.’s and untouchable guests.
A Los Angeles-based artist, Tyler Ramsey, agreed to operate as the cover during the Bahrain trip. Famous for his drip-paint technique and for decorating 50,000 Toms Shoes in his signature style, Ramsey would go to Bahrain and do what he does best: performance art. “Make sure I don’t end up in a jail cell,” he told us.
The plan was that a member of our crew would switch places with Abdulemam at a fast-food restaurant, and we would depart on a private plane from an airport runway usually reserved for VIPs. Ramsey’s entourage would include two Abdulemam look-alikes. The TV host and actress Elizabeth Chambers would also join the crew as a faux correspondent for Ramsey, knowing how to juggle the circus environment we sought to create while keeping the maneuver on point.
We reserved a chartered jet to fly us from Cyprus’s Larnaca airport to Bahrain and to fly our faux celebrity team back to Cyprus. The visit to Bahrain would take three days, and the switch would happen in a fast-food eatery on the way to the departure plane. We would invite Abdulemam to switch clothes with his double and allow us to perform some minor aesthetic transformations to make him pass muster at the airport. In Bahrain, people on private planes and in a V.I.P. delegation don’t get their fingerprints scanned or subjected to interviews. They simply go from limo to jet without pesky security checks.
The Human Rights Foundation had also consulted with Nasser Weddady , a human rights advocate working at the Boston-based American Islamic Congress, to help with Mr. Abdulemam’s escape. Mr. Weddady, who was Mr. Abdulemam’s “only conduit” in the past two years, was the one who used the code names for Mr. Abdulemam and Bahrain that ultimately informed the escape team that Mr. Abdulemam had, in fact, managed to flee by other means:
“Abort plan, Bjorn has left Fiji.”
On Friday, Mr. Halvorssen said in a telephone interview that Mr. Abdulemam later told him that he had fled Bahrain by car. In his statement he wrote:
As luck would have it, Abdulemam was given a “now or never” chance by someone in Bahrain to exit through Saudi Arabia in a car with a secret compartment. Passport control did not inspect the car. From Saudi, he went to Kuwait by land through a sparsely patrolled area, where fishermen smuggled Abdulemam into Iraq by sea. From a port near Basra, he traveled to Najaf, where he took an Iraqi Airways flight to connect and eventually arrive in London.
The wife and two children of Mr. Abdulemam, 35, are still in Bahrain and efforts are under way for them to join him in Britain, Mr. Halvorssen said in the phone interview.
“I have just been waiting for the moment I could be reunited with them,” Mr. Abdulemam said in an interview with The Guardian in an undisclosed location in Britain on Friday.
The news network Al Jazeera also spoke to Mr. Abdulemam in an interview. There, he was quoted on Friday as saying the “time came” for him to help people in Bahrain publicly instead of in hiding.”
He added, “I will not be able to work and to support the uprising in Bahrain if I’m inside the jail.”