Shooting the sheikhs

ANGER is rising in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province after security forces arrested and wounded one of the government’s harshest critics, a Shia cleric called Nimr al-Nimr (pictured). Two young men were shot dead in the protests that followed. This takes the total number of Saudis killed since the start of the Arab spring a year and a half ago to ten, all from the Shia minority that makes up about a tenth of the country’s 27m-odd people.

Sheikh Nimr has long been a thorn in the side of the ruling family. A warrant for his arrest was first issued in 2009 after he said that if Saudi Shias were not allowed to “live with dignity”, the eastern provinces should secede from the kingdom. Such talk is particularly inflammatory, since most of Saudi Arabia’s oilfields are in the east.