Talk:Death of Abdulredha Buhmaid

Military POV
Is represented in two separate paragraphs without being connected together. "The army denied firing the lethal shot on Buhmaid, on the basis of an ordnance expert's report that concluded the shot was fired from a high elevation." and "Military prosecutors carried out an investigation and concluded that the calibre and trajectory of the bullet that killed Buhmaid were inconsistent with the bullet having been shot by the Bahrain Defense Force (BDF)."

I suggest combining them while still mentioning that there were several witnesses and journalists who saw army firing from high buildings. It's sad that BICI totally ignored this point.  Mohamed CJ  (talk)  15:55, 29 July 2012 (UTC)


 * ✅  Mohamed CJ  (talk)  07:50, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

BICI POV on responsibility for death
What is the BICI POV on the responsibility of Buhmaid's death? In the English version http://files.bici.org.bh/BICIreportEN.pdf = http://www.webcitation.org/69VBjs0IJ, we have:


 * page 228, section header Part 2 - Case-by-Case Analysis, a) "Deaths Attributed to Security Forces" ... this includes the pages 233-234 report on Buhmaid


 * subsection page 233 "Deaths caused by the use of a firearm", "Case No. 08 - Abdul ... Buhamaid"


 * pages 233-234 - There's a description of BICI's understanding of the sequence of events relevant to the shooting of Buhmaid.


 * page 234, point 934. "The death of Mr Abdulredha Buhamaid may be attributed to the BDF and may have resulted from the use of excessive and unnecessary lethal force. The Military AG [Attorney-General, probably] purports to have conducted an effective investigation, which found that ... the lethal bullet ... could not have been fired by the BDF." (Emphasis added by me.)


 * page 235 (another case) "The Commission is able to establish that Mr Salman was shot by police officers."


 * page 235 (another case) "The Commission is able to establish that Mr Salman was shot by security forces."


 * page 246 (another case) "The death of Mr Jumaa can be attributed to the use of excessive force by police. ... The MoI investigation has identified the officer responsible for the death."


 * page 247 (another case) "The death of Ms Alaradi is attributable to BDF."

The members of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry are lawyers, and the definition of their task is not to carry out court trials of people suspected of human rights violations, but they are expected to make claims, depending on the evidence they see, on what they perceive to be the facts. It seems to me reasonable that highly experienced lawyers are going to make statements in their report more like "these are the lines of evidence strongly pointing to conclusion X" or "these are the lines of evidence for X and these are the lines of evidence against X" (NPOV), with the implicit possibility of their report being used to motivate legal actions, rather than making outright claims "this happened". So IMHO "Attributed to Security Forces" means "the evidence strongly points that way, but we have not carried out a court trial, so we don't claim these as necessarily 'the truth'". "Able to establish" sounds to me like "the evidence is very strong and we see no counterarguments". On the other hand, some of the statements are quite direct claims of truth, e.g. "The MoI investigation has identified the officer responsible for the death."

In the case of Buhmaid, BICI is clearly aware of the military investigation, but also presents it NPOV-ed - as a claim, with "purports", which has a connotation of being somewhat sceptical. But BICI does not state directly, "We consider this investigation to lack credibility, and so we attribute Buhmaid's death to the BDF despite the military AG's claim." I cannot believe that the BICI intended to say "it is true both that the lethal bullet was shot by a BDF member and that the lethal bullet was not shot by a BDF member".

Returning to the beginning of point 934: In the two uses of "may" in the same sentence referring to Buhmaid, the second "may" clearly means "maybe". If the first "may" was intended to be definite, i think the report authors would have avoided using the same word. The sentence is followed by the summary of the military claim that Buhmaid cannot have been shot by the BDF - without any outright statement that BICI considers the claim wrong or right. IMHO the intention is clear: BICI says that in the general context it seems quite credible that he was shot by the BDF, but that the claim by the military of a concrete counterargument must be considered seriously in any deeper search for the truth.

I don't think the fact of including this case in a section of "Deaths Attributable to Security Forces" overrides what is said in the two pages 233-234.

Nigel_S._Rodley, one of the BICI members, doesn't seem to be fluent in Arabic, according to his Wikipedia entry, so i would be surprised if BICI considered the Arabic version to take precedence over the English version in the case of small differences in meaning. Given their profiles, it seems more likely that the language common to all BICI members is English.

In summary, the BICI is itself responsible for using somewhat ambiguous language, so we can either quote the "may be attributed" or we can use our own words and describe what IMHO is the obviously intended meaning, "might be attributed". I don't think that "while ... contrary opinion" counts as weasel words here. It's obvious that the BDF is suspected of being responsible and that that would contradict the military investigation. We just express the same NPOV that's in the BICI report.

Boud (talk) 20:25, 29 July 2012 (UTC)


 * Long story short, as long as his death is in "Deaths Attributed to Security Forces", then they attribute his death to security forces. The rest is professional language made by professionals which we might not be supposed to interpret. Besides, BICI is not the only source we have, there are plenty other sources; all of those used in the article are independent reliable sources which include international human rights organisations. Rodley didn't write the report by himself. I'm sure he had significant contribution to it, especially to torture section, but there were four other judges, including a woman who wrote a pro-gov article months before her appointment. Nabeel Rajab is one of the guys who criticized BICI report, he said it was not independent .  Mohamed CJ  (talk)  20:45, 29 July 2012 (UTC)


 * IMHO looks OK on this point, so we seem to have converged in terms of edits. I disagree on some of your points, though i don't think that that is a problem for the edits.


 * "Deaths Attributed to Security Forces" is in the passive voice. Maybe there's somewhere in the full text where this is disambiguated, but on its own, it can be interpreted either that BICI has found what it considers to be reliable sources that attribute the deaths to security forces, or that BICI itself makes this attribution. This section title does not state who makes the attribution. An unambiguous section title would be e.g. "Deaths caused by Security Forces".


 * Regarding "interpretation" of the language, we either have to quote or summarise the meaning. When the meaning is potentially ambiguous, we need to discuss to decide if it is really ambiguous or not. If Wikipedians cannot agree on the meaning, then chances are it is ambiguous. Professional lawyers are generally aware of subtle linguistic differences in meaning, especially in terms of legal definitions of words, which do not always match standard language (e.g. in many jurisdictions, humans are not animals, despite the overwhelming consensus in biology; corporations are "legal persons"; etc), so when they use ambiguous language, they are probably well aware of that.


 * I'm not sure your other points directly relate to a possible need to edit the attribution sentence/paragraph. Stating BICI's POV is an important fact, independent of whether or not BICI is biased in one direction or another. What would be useful could be, e.g. if a source argued that the military analysis ignored the possibility that Buhmaid was shot by a sniper in a helicopter: the calibre and trajectory of the lethal bullet would be different to those fired by BDF ground forces. At the moment this is just my "original research" (though not terribly original and not really research either, just randomly putting together what i seem to have read), so not useful for the article. If e.g. a human rights organisation said something like that, then that would become usable.


 * In any case, looks to me to be correctly matched to the source. Boud (talk) 20:46, 30 July 2012 (UTC)


 * Good :) Nice catch with the "no comment", after going through it again, I think it referred to 15 February.  Mohamed CJ  (talk)  21:23, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

External videos
I think the second video from BDF side should't be used as an external video. I don't know if it's supposed to be a mock of the army, but you can clearly see the sky dark and then they say "after 45 mins" and it becomes brighter. Also the claim in the beginning of the video about use of blood bags is actually cropped from this video where a protester picks blood of another protester from ground, it's probably Buhmaid's blood. If anything is good of it, it is that it shows the distance between protesters and the army and the type of megaphone the latter used to warn protester seen at 1:40, however all of that is already available in the first video.  Mohamed CJ  (talk)  09:59, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

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