A 14-YEAR-OLD boy has been killed during anti-government protests in Bahrain today.

Al Jazeera reports that Opposition activists and the boy’s relatives claim he was killed by police who fired a tear gas canister at him as protesters clashed with security forces.

The al-Wefaq group blamed the teenager’s death on the police.  The boy, Ali Jawad Ahmad, was demonstrating with a group of protesters in Sitra.

The New York Times has obtained from the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights, of the dead boy.

The Government has confirmed the death in the oil town of Sitra, which is just south of the capital of Manama.

According to Bahrain’s state-run news agency, police have denied that there was any action against people in Sitra at the time of the death, except to disperse a “small crowd” of 10 people at 1.15am.

According to Al Jazeera, about 30 people have been killed since demonstrations began in February. Although not quite at the scale seen elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa, some of the Gulf kingdom’s population was inspired to take to the streets to demand reforms.