The police in Tunisia have arrested former prime minister Ali Larayedh, his Islamist-inspired Ennahdha party said Tuesday, accusing authorities of trying to divert attention from calls for President Kais Saied to quit.
Africa Today News, New York reports that the arrest of the second-ranking Ennahdha member comes only days after nearly 90% of voters abstained from an election to a toothless new parliament that Saied constructed after seizing broad authority in 2021.
Larayedh, who presided over Tunisia from 2013 to 2014, was arrested as part of a probe into allegations that he helped thousands of young Tunisians leave the country to join terrorist organisations overseas.
Up to 6,000 Tunisians travelled to Libya, Iraq, and Syria to serve as foreign fighter volunteers; this figure, according to secular opposition parties, suggests intentional disregard.
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The investigation, which has also targeted Ennahdha’s veteran leader Rached Ghannouchi, was launched after the vehemently anti-Islamist president sacked the government and suspended parliament in July 2021.
Saied has defended his power grab as necessary to end the repeated political crises that accompanied the North African country’s transition to democracy following the first of the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011.
But his efforts to legitimise his new powers have been repeatedly snubbed by voters, first in a widely boycotted July referendum and then in Saturday’s parliamentary election.
Ennahdha, which like almost all Tunisian parties boycotted the vote, accused Saied’s government of “systematically targeting” its leadership.
The party said that Larayedh’s arrest marked a “desperate effort by the coup administration and its president, Kais Saied, to cover up the farce of the parliamentary election which was boycotted by 90 percent of voters”.
Ahmed Nejib Chebbi, president of the country’s main opposition coalition, told journalists on Tuesday that the arrest was intended “to distract attention from the results of an election ignored by the public”.
Chebbi’s National Salvation Front, which includes Ennahdha, had said the slim election turnout should be a cue for Saied to step down.
But Saied hit back at his critics Monday, noting that some of them had criminal charges hanging over them, a veiled reference to investigations into Ennahdha officials.