Bahrain has stepped up the arrests of Shia Muslims,
including cyber activists, with more than 300 detained and dozens missing since
it launched a crackdown on pro-democracy protests, the opposition has said.

Activists and politicians said on Thursday that a growing
number of reform campaigners are going into hiding, after the country’s top
blogger was arrested on Wednesday.

“The situation is critical … Almost all the bloggers
and activists who aren’t in jail are now in hiding,” Nabeel Rajab, head of
the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, said.

Earlier this month, the Gulf Arab island’s Sunni rulers
imposed martial law and called in troops from fellow Sunni-ruled neighbors,
including Saudi Arabia, to quell the protest movement led mostly by the state’s
Shia majority.

The severity of the crackdown, in which public gatherings
are banned and security forces have been deployed at checkpoints, stunned
Bahrain’s Shia Muslims and angered the region’s non-Arab Shia power Iran.

Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states fearful of rising Iranian
influence see Bahrain as a red line among the popular uprisings that have
occurred this year.

“The government says it is taking steps to ensure
stability and security, but what’s happening is the exact opposite,”
Mattar Ibrahim Mattar, a member of the country’s largest Shia opposition group
Wefaq, said.

“We’re in one of the most dangerous stages, where
citizens have no security. They’re being arrested and kidnapped at checkpoints
that are all over Bahrain. The checkpoints are a place of fear.”

Mattar said Wefaq counted 302 arrests on Wednesday but
believed the number would grow to 400.

Hizbullah denial

Meanwhile, the Lebanese Shia movement Hizbullah denied on
Thursday that it had given military training to Shia Bahraini protesters.

In a recent televised speech, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the
Hizbullah leader, offered support to the protesters in Bahrain, but did not
specify what kind of assistance.

Last week, Bahrain lodged a formal complaint to the Lebanese
government over Hizbullah’s offer.

“We have to affirm that our Bahraini brothers did not
ask us for any military or security training on any day and we have not given
any training of that kind,” Hizbullah said in a statement, adding that the
group had only provided political and moral support for the protests.

Bahraini activists and opposition politicians said the
campaign of arrests had taken a chilling turn following the arrest of the
prominent blogger Mahmood al-Yousif.

Yousif, who for years has promoted anti-sectarianism under
the slogan “No Shia, No Sunni, Just Bahraini”, is believed to have
been arrested in the early hours of Wednesday. His wife, Frances Irvine, said
she arrived home from a trip to find her husband missing, as well as his
computer.

“He phoned us at 10 am to tell our son he was being
held ‘as a guest’ and was okay. I don’t know what that means, and I’ve had no
other contact. We have no idea where he is,” she said.

Yousif was considered a liberal who criticized the Sunni
rulers for their lack of reform but also chided Wefaq for not moving more
quickly to talks with the government.

More than 60 percent of Bahrainis are Shia and most want a
constitutional monarchy.

Demands by hardliners for the overthrow of the monarchy have
alarmed minority Sunnis.