- 07/07/2012 by Jean MArlow (Witness Bahrain)

Ali Al-Sheikh loved playing sports, swimming, and taking photographs. Photography was a growing passion of his. At age fourteen, he was already on his fourth camera, constantly begging his parents for bigger and better ones.Ali’s little brother, twelve-year-old Ahmad, seems to have inherited his brother’s interest in cameras. In his home two nights ago, he motioned for me to hand him my video camera so he could film his mother (Um Ali) showing me Ali’s possessions in their small apartment in Sitra, Bahrain.Ahmad scrambled onto the bed to get a good angle and opened the view finder as Um Ali buried her face in a pile of Ali’s sports shirts, breathed in their odor, and began to cry.She has been smelling Ali’s clothes and blanket every night before she goes to sleep since August 31, 2011, the day that her son was shot and killed by a tear gas canister to the back of his head.Ali had been active in the protests since the beginning of Bahrain’s pro-democracy uprising, in the Pearl Roundabout days.