Protesters 'fired upon' in Bahrain

Bahraini troops have opened fire on demonstrators according to a former politician, as the government continued a crack-down on opposition protests.

Jalal Firooz, a member of the Wefaq bloc that resigned from parliament on Thursday, said demonstrators, marking the death of a protester killed earlier this week, had made for Pearl Square, where army troops opened fire.

Earlier, soldiers fired tear gas and fired into the air as thousands defied a ban in the capital Manama.

Four people were killed and 231 wounded when riot police raided a protest camp in the early hours of Thursday, when most of the demonstrators were sleeping.

Soldiers in tanks and armoured vehicles later took control of the square, which mainly Shia protesters had hoped to use as a base similar to Cairo's Tahrir Square, the heart of protests that toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Several thousand mourners turned out on Friday to bury those killed in what Bahrain's top Shia cleric called a "massacre" ordered by the island's Sunni ruling family to crush protests.