Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, pauses during a conference at the Swiss Press Club in Geneva June 18, 2014.

MANAMA — Prominent Bahraini activist Nabeel Rajab was sentenced to six months in prison for a tweet posted last year, which was considered insulting to the Gulf Kingdom’s Ministries of Interior and Defense.

The world-renown human rights activist and president of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR) posted a tweet confirming his sentencing and saying it would be suspended pending a fine of about $530.

In October Rajab was arrested and charged with publicly “insulting a public institution.” The Interior Ministry stated that it had summoned Rajab “regarding tweets posted on his Twitter account that denigrated government institutions.” Rajab was freed on bail in November having spent a month in detention. He could have faced up to six years in prison. 

In his tweet posted in September, he suggested that Bahraini security institutions could act as an “ideological incubator” for terrorism and “Islamic State” militants.

“Many #Bahrain men who joined #terrorism & #ISIS came from security institutions and those institutions were the first ideological incubator,” Rajab wrote in a Tweet last September. 

He allegedly posted the tweet as a comment to an article published on Global Voices in July concerning former Bahraini politicians and preachers, who had pledged allegiance to IS militants.

The human rights watchdog Amnesty International said in response that the Bahraini ruling was a blow to freedom of expression.