Tunisian Ennahda Party Senior Official Gains Freedom

A senior official from the biggest party in Tunisia’s suspended parliament was released from more than two months of detention early on Tuesday, his party said.

Noureddine Bhairi – vice president of the moderate Islamist Ennahda party which has accused President Kais Saied of mounting a coup by dissolving parliament and seizing executive powers – arrived at his house at dawn in an ambulance.

The 64-year-old mounted a hunger strike while in detention, his supporters said. The video footage released by his party appeared to show Bhairi had lost a lot of weight.

The interior minister said in January Bhairi had been held for illegal submission of passports and nationality documents and on suspicion of terrorism, without going into details. Ennahda dismissed the charges as politically motivated.

“Thank God for freedom, we hope to get Tunisia out of the stage of injustice, revenge,” the head of Ennahda party, Rached Ghannouchi, and the speaker of the suspended parliament said after Bhairi’s release.

The interior ministry said “it had lifted what it called Bhairi’s house arrest after the appointment of a new Supreme Judicial Council which would allow the judiciary to complete the investigation into his case.” 

President Saied on Monday appointed a temporary replacement for the country’s top judicial council, a body he dissolved last month in what his opponents called a move to consolidate his power.

The president seized executive authority in July saying “the move was temporary and needed to save Tunisia from what he saw as a corrupt, self-serving elite.”

Since Saied’s July intervention, several senior politicians and business leaders have been detained or prosecuted, often on charges of ‘corruption’ or ‘defamation.’

Rights groups have criticised some of those arrests and the use of military courts to hear such cases.

There has been no widespread campaign of arrests of critics of Saied or other dissidents and the state news agency has continued to report news that is unfavourable to the government.

Reuters/Shakirat Sadiq