Page 374 - Records of Bahrain (6)_Neat

362 Records of Bahrain

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an orderly fashion. Somewhere here an incident occurred, an
Arab boy in the crowd was said to have been hit by a stone
thrown from a Jewish house. As at least a dozen people in
different places all allege that they saw the stone thrown
there is some doubt as to what actually happened, but an Arab
boy was damaged and later he was taken to hospital, some say
that he fell in the mud in front of a car. By this time a
party of girl teachers from the Muharraq schools, in a bus, had
joined the procession. They too shouted slogans and
trailed a flag behind the bus. Arrangements for them to come
had been made by Yusuf Obedli, The procession then moved on
to the Jewish synagogue. On arriving at the building the pro­
cession halted and in spite of the efforts of the police and
the attempt which was made by one or two of the organisers to
restrain the crowd a mass of people burst into the building.
From that moment the procession became a mob, completely out
of control. The schoolboys and many of the young men rapidly
disappeared and the Persians assisted by a crowd of bazaar
loafers and prostitutes rapidly ransacked the synagogue and
then started looting the next door building which was also a
Jewish house. More police were called in but they were com­
pletely outnumbered and could do very little. Only after
orders had been given to the police to fire, in the air, did
the mob outside the buildings disperse. When I arrived on the
scene the synagogue had been entirely stripped and the house
next door was full of people who were hacking the doors and
windows and even the window frames out of the building and men
and women were carrying off loot of every kind. The house was
cleared and a number of arrests were made. A message was
brought that the mob was beginning to sack the Jews bazaar, Some
police were left in charge of the synagogue and the adjacent
house and a party of police hurried to the bazaar. Here the mob
was beginning to break the doors of the larger shops, three small
shops had already been looted. The police attacked the looters
with the butt end of their rifles inflicting some casualties and
in a very short time the bazaar was cleared. Many arrests could
have been made but no police could be spared to take charge of the
men who were arrested. When the Police reached the end of the
bazaar shouting was heard along Shara-Tajaar and while some of
the police chased the rioters out of the covered bazaar another
party went to the rescue of the occupants of a house near the
office of Mohomed Tyeb-Khunji. With difficulty the police forced
a way through a solid mass of people and one or two mounted the
narrow stairs to a first floor dwelling one side of which was
occupied by Jews, the other Sikhs. A Sikh woman was defending
her house, vigorously, and a herd of Jews were huddled in a corner
of their house. Many of them were covered with blood, they
women and children, Persian Jews. The house was full of looters,
most of them Persians. They were driven out of the house by the
Police, mainly by the expedient of throwing them down the stairs,

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