DUBAI, March 1, (Agencies): A Saudi Arabian official denied a report on Tuesday in an Egyptian newspaper that the kingdom had sent tanks to Bahrain to try to quell protests there.
Brent crude oil hit a session high of $113.15 a barrel on the report before easing to $112.96 by 1337 GMT.
The official at the Saudi defence ministry said no tanks had crossed the causeway to Bahrain. The official requested anonymity.
Saudi authorities detained a Shi’ite cleric in the Eastern Province after he called for a constitutional monarchy and an end to corruption and discrimination, human rights activists said on Tuesday.
Its Shi’ite minority, believed to be 10-15 percent of the 18 million Saudi population, has long complained of discrimination, a charged denied by the authorities.
Tawfiq al-Amir, who has been detained before for speaking out about religious freedom, made his call in a Friday sermon in the eastern town of Hafouf. Security police detained him on Sunday, said Mohammad Gabran, a local rights activist.

“Previously his sole care was religious freedoms but in his last sermon he changed his direction and started demanding a constitutional monarchy,” Gabran said.
“He called me when they came to take him. They informed him they were state security and they came to take him.”
Officials at the General Directorate of Investigations, an investigative arm of the government, could not immediately be reached for comment.
Analysts say the government is anxious that unrest may spread from neighbouring Bahrain, where majority Shi’ites have been protesting against the Sunni government. Thousands of people are circulating emailed petitions and support Facebook groups calling for reform, an end to corruption and a constitutional monarchy in Saudi Arabia.
Activists set up Facebook pages calling for protests on March 11 and 20 but many locals doubt that those protests will take place as the government closely monitors social media and would stop any attempt to protest.

“The Saudi government should listen to the demands of its citizens, not seek to stifle them,” said Christoph Wilcke, senior Middle East researcher in a Human Rights Watch report.
“Calling for equal rights for an oppressed religious minority should not be a reason for harassment and arrest,” he said.
A leading Shiite activist jailed for six months and released last week warned of more bloodshed in the Gulf state ruled by a Sunni dynasty if popular demands for greater democracy were not met.
“My anticipation is that the situation will lead to more bloodshed if they (the regime) continue to turn a blind eye on the protesters in the street,” said Abduljalil Singace, a leader of the hardcore opposition Haq movement and one of 25 Shiites who were granted royal pardon last week.
Protesters in the Shiite-majority kingdom, who have been demonstrating against the government since February 14, “will go into activities which will not be welcomed,” he said.

Sporting a T-shirt that read, “Ready to die for Bahrain,” Singace told AFP in an interview at his home late Monday that the Al-Khalifa monarchy’s offer for dialogue was “too little, too late,” as anger continues to rise in the streets of the capital Manama.
“I do not call that dialogue... The game is over,” said Singace, who was detained in August on charges of terrorism and released last week.
Discontent is rising in the Shiite community of Bahrain, a Saudi-allied, majority Shiite archipelago which has been ruled for two centuries by the Sunni Al-Khalifa dynasty.
Inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, protesters have since February 14 been staging street protests against what they say are decades of discrimination and oppression.
Embattled King Hamad last week offered a concession to the anti-government camp, granting royal pardon to 308 Shiite activists.

Some of the freed prisoners including Singace, who suffers partial paralysis, have accused Bahraini authorities of torture, saying they used methods that include electrocution, solitary confinement and sleep deprivation.
The government has said it would launch a probe into the allegations.
Placing his crutches aside, Singace calmly recounted the details of his torture.
“I was in solitary confinement for 45 days at first, during which time I was deprived of my glasses and my crutches except when I was allowed to visit the toilet,” he said.
“For the first 10 days, I was made to wear a black mask over my eyes and could not tell how much time had passed until later.
“Others were subject to worse, from insulting their confession to sexual humiliation and threatening to rape their wives and daughters,” he said.
Demonstrators at the square say the release of the activists has only boosted their determination to see their demands met.
Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Manama Tuesday in a third week of anti-regime demonstrations.

“We are brothers, Sunnis and Shiites,” chanted the predominantly Shiite protesters as they slowly wove their way from the Salmaniah district of the capital to Pearl Square, epicentre of the anti-regime protests and sit-in, some three kilometres (1.8 miles) away.
“The people want the fall of the regime,” they shouted from two separate processions, segregated by gender, on either side of the King Faisal Highway.
Women were out in force, forming a sea of black in traditional abaya cloaks and headscarves and marching alongside men and children on the road, where security forces shot dead seven protesters in a rally last week.
A handful of disabled protesters in wheelchairs marched at the front of the lines as volunteer organisers in orange vests cut off traffic circulation.
“We are in this march to stress the unity between Shiites and Sunnis in Bahrain,” said Sheikh Mohammed Habib al-Muqdad, a cleric who was among 25 activists on trial for terrorism charges and were freed last week in a royal pardon.
“Dialogue is only an option once the regime steps down,” Muqdad told AFP at the protest.

Oman
Omani troops fired into the air near a port on Tuesday to clear a fourth day of protests by people demanding jobs and political reforms, wounding one person in the town of Sohar, witnesses said.
“We were about 200 to 300 people on the road. The army started shooting in the air,” one protester in Sohar said, declining to be named. “Many people ran. The man who was shot (had) come to calm the army down.”
The crowd dispersed before regrouping again near the port IN north Oman, the witnesses said, and the troops pulled back.
The unrest in Sohar, Oman’s main industrial centre, was a rare outbreak of discontent in the normally tranquil Gulf state, ruled by Sultan Qaboos bin Said for four decades, following a wave of pro-democracy protests across the Arab world.
Trying to calm tensions, the sultan on Sunday promised 50,000 jobs, unemployment benefits of $390 a month and to study widening the power of a quasi-parliamentary advisory council.

In Sohar after the confrontation, traffic flowed freely into the port, which exports 160,000 barrels per day of refined oil products, despite the presence of around 150 protesters. Protesters had blocked the entrance to the port on Monday.
Omani troops had been deployed in the city beforehand but until Tuesday had refrained from intervening to stop protests.
At the nearby Globe Roundabout, centre of the Sohar protests that have drawn up to 2,000 people, five armoured vehicles watched the square but no demonstrators could be seen.
Later in the capital Muscat, about 200 people gathered in a silent protest in front of the building of the Shura Council, the elected advisory body, asking for jobs and reforms.

The carried placards reading “We want jobs”, “We want higher salaries” and “We want freedom of the press”, asking the council to inform the sultan about their demands.
About 2,000 people also gathered at a Muscat mosque to voice support for Sultan Qaboos and the government, blaming violence during this week’s demonstrations on protesters, residents said.
Sohar Industrial Port Company said on Tuesday that Western management had returned to Sohar from Muscat, where they had been moved to on Monday as a precautionary measure. The Dutch families of the management will remain in Muscat, however.
The harbour is accessible again, both by sea and land, and ships have started arriving again in the port, where loading and unloading has resumed, the company said in a statement.
The US State Department said on Monday, the same day Sohar protests spread to Muscat, that Washington was encouraging restraint and dialogue in Oman, strategically important because it faces arch-US adversary Iran across the Arabian Sea.

Oman has strong military and political ties with the United States and is a non-OPEC oil exporter that pumps around 850,000 barrels per day.
As many as six people were killed in Sohar on Sunday when police opened fire on stone-throwing demonstrators after failing to scatter them with batons and tear gas.
A doctor and nurses at a state hospital said six people died but the health minister put the toll at one.
Sultan Qaboos, who exercises absolute power in a country where political parties are banned, gave more independence to the public prosecutor on Tuesday and ordered the creation of an independent consumer protection watchdog to monitor prices.
The steps were the latest in a series of modest moves by Oman and came after the sultan reshuffled his cabinet on Saturday, a week after a small protest in Muscat gave the first hint that Arab discontent could reach the state.

“We see the two royal decrees as part of the new reforms ... Next we want him to consider an elected government and a constitution change,” said Zakaria al-Mharmi, an intellectual who has been a prominent face in the Muscat protests.
Mostly wealthy Gulf Arab countries have pledged billions of dollars in state benefits and some offered modest reforms to appease their populations influenced by popular unrest that toppled the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt and is threatening Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s grip on power.
Protesters in Oman have stopped short of calling for a change of government, unlike in neighbouring Yemen, where protesters want the president to go, and in fellow Gulf Arab state Bahrain, where protesters want the prime minister sacked.
Sultan Qaboos appoints the cabinet and in 1992 introduced an elected advisory Shura Council. Protesters have demanded the council be given legislative powers and on Sunday Qaboos ordered a committee to study increasing its authority.