Bahrain Referred Alleged IRGC-Linked Cells to Trial as Prosecutors Closed Their Investigation
Yemen Herald News 
Bahrain’s Public Prosecution said in late March 2026 that it had concluded investigations into a group of alleged cells accused of working with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps against the kingdom, and had referred the suspects to the High Criminal Court. The announcement came a month into the regional war between Iran and a United States and Israeli coalition, and at a point when Gulf states were reporting missile and drone attacks on their own territory.
According to the prosecution’s account, the accused had been in contact with IRGC operatives and had passed on maps and photographs of sensitive locations inside Bahrain, including coordinates transmitted through encrypted messaging applications. Prosecutors said some of the material implied the selection of potential military targets. The suspects were also accused of circulating content that celebrated attacks and encouraged further violence.
The prosecution said the group had spread false claims about strikes on important facilities and about civilian casualties, with the aim of spreading alarm among the public. Charges of this kind, covering both the intelligence element and the information element, have become a standard feature of Bahraini national security cases.
These allegations are the government’s, set out in a prosecution statement rather than tested in court at that stage, and Bahraini national security cases have drawn criticism in the past from international human rights organisations over the use of confessions and the conduct of trials. Iran has consistently rejected accusations that it runs networks inside Bahrain.
The March referral was one step in a sequence that ran through most of 2026. Earlier in the month, four Bahraini citizens had been arrested on 12 March and five more on 15 March over alleged espionage and the sharing of sensitive information with the IRGC. Those arrests, made while the regional war was at its height, formed the basis of the case the prosecution closed at the end of the month.
The scale of the investigation grew considerably afterwards. On 9 May 2026, Bahrain’s Ministry of Interior announced the arrest of 41 people it said belonged to an organisation linked to the Revolutionary Guard and to the doctrine of wilayat al-faqih. The ministry said the group had monitored sensitive locations, gathered intelligence on strategic sites, and collected funds intended for transfer to Iran in support of IRGC operations.
Bahrain’s authorities described the May network as connected to the Basij, the volunteer paramilitary force under IRGC command. King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa subsequently said the kingdom would review its citizenship rules in light of the crackdown, a measure with a long and contested history in Bahrain, where revocation of nationality has previously been used against political opponents.
By July 2026, the High Criminal Court had held its first hearing in a national security case involving 19 defendants accused of forming and running an organisation that prosecutors said sought to destabilise the constitutional order. Further arrests were reported in June, when the Interior Ministry announced 15 more detentions on similar grounds.
Bahrain itself came under fire during the conflict. The kingdom reported large numbers of missiles and drones engaged by its air defences as Iran’s campaign widened through March, and the government urged residents to stay away from areas around military installations. That experience shaped the urgency with which the prosecutions were pursued.
The security context behind the cases was immediate rather than theoretical. Bahrain hosts the United States Fifth Fleet at Juffair, and during the 2026 war Iranian retaliatory strikes reached locations in and around the Gulf, including areas near American naval facilities. For a small island state with a large foreign military presence, the possibility that reconnaissance was being carried out from inside the country carried obvious weight.
Bahrain also sits inside a longer political argument. The kingdom has a Shia-majority population governed by a Sunni monarchy, and the government has for years attributed unrest to Iranian sponsorship, while opposition figures and rights groups have argued that domestic grievances over political representation and employment are the real driver. Cases like this one are read very differently depending on which of those accounts a person accepts.
The regional war that framed the arrests began on 28 February 2026, after talks between Washington and Tehran collapsed, and ran until a ceasefire agreed on 7 and 8 April. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was killed in the opening phase, and his son Mojtaba was named to succeed him on 8 March. The Strait of Hormuz was closed for part of the conflict and its reopening formed part of the ceasefire terms.
For Yemen, the Bahraini proceedings mattered less directly than the maritime dimension of the same confrontation. Shipping through the Red Sea, the Bab al-Mandab and the Gulf of Aden operated under elevated risk throughout the war, and the cost of moving cargo to Yemeni ports rose accordingly. In a country that imports the large majority of its food, fuel and medicine, that translated quickly into prices in local markets.
The Bahraini cases have continued through the courts since, and the kingdom has not published a consolidated account of how many people have been charged in total across the separate investigations announced in March, May and June 2026. What the March referral established was the template: intelligence-gathering charges paired with information offences, prosecuted through the High Criminal Court under the national security framework.
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