Bahrain's appeals court refused bail Tuesday for Shiite opposition chief Ali Salman pending its review of his conviction for inciting disobedience and hatred, while the prosecution demanded his four-year sentence be stiffened.

Salman was convicted of those two charges in June, but acquitted of the more serious one of seeking to topple the monarchy and change the political system in the Sunni-ruled Gulf state.

A bomb blast killed two Bahrain policemen and wounded six others Tuesday in an area often shaken by clashes between security forces and Shiite Muslim protesters, the interior ministry said.

Bahrain has seen frequent unrest since the minority Sunni rulers of the small Gulf kingdom crushed a Shiite-led uprising four years ago.

A man was killed trying to plant a bomb targeting police in a Shiite village near the Bahraini capital, the interior ministry said on Wednesday.

The ministry, on its Twitter account, said the failed attack took place in the village of Ekr but it did not identify the man killed.

A Bahraini court has sentenced three defendants to 15 years each in prison after it convicted them of blowing up a car in the capital last year, official media said.

Bahrain remains deeply divided following a Shiite-led uprising in 2011 that was crushed by the Sunni authorities.

Bahrain's Foreign Minister Khalid al-Khalifa blamed on Tuesday Hizbullah for the attack that killed a policeman in the town of Damistan, southwest of Manama.

"Another policeman falls martyr in Bahrain," he wrote on Twitter, adding: "He was killed by a bomb made by Hizbullah, the terrorist party".

Bahrainis voted Saturday in the final round of the Gulf kingdom's first legislative elections since the minority Sunni authorities crushed pro-democracy protests led by the Shiite majority in 2011.

Controversy clouded last weekend's first round and its focus on turnout, a key marker of the validity of the election, after the opposition boycotted it, calling it a "farce."

Bahraini police said Monday they defused a homemade bomb in a car on a main road in Manama.

Police on Sunday "found and defused a pipe bomb and two gas cylinders that had been placed inside the car," they said in a statement.

Security forces clashed with Shiite protesters who tried to march towards the Bahraini capital's symbolic Pearl Square on Friday to mark the third anniversary of an Arab Spring-inspired uprising, witnesses said.

Protesters, who gathered in several Shiite villages to walk towards Pearl Square, where demonstrators camped out for a month in early 2011 before being violently dispersed by troops, were met with tear gas and bird shot, the witnesses said.

Bahrain's police fired tear gas and used sound bombs to disperse hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday in a Shiite village near the capital, witnesses said.

They said the incident took place at a road junction in Sanabis following the funeral of a 15-year-old youth.

A Bahrain appeals court has upheld jail terms of up to 15 years for 17 Shiites convicted over attacks on police in the unrest-hit country, a judicial source said Tuesday.

The Manama court, which delivered the verdicts on Monday, also reduced by seven years sentences for three other defendants in the same case, the source said.