By Enyichukwu Enemanna
Military court in Tunisia on Friday found a die-hard critic of President Kais Saied guilty of insulting police during a standoff at Tunis airport in March 2021 and sentenced to 14 months imprisonment, his lawyer has said.
Following this, he was in the early hours of Saturday taken into custody by plainclothes security officers.
Seifeddine Makhlouf, head of Islamist nationalist party Al-Karama, shouted “down with the coup” and “long live Tunisia” before being bundled into a car, a video posted by his lawyer Ines Harrath on Facebook indicates.
Rights groups say military trials of civilians have become increasingly common in Tunisia since a power grab by Saied.
A court had earlier sentenced him to five months’ jail.
“Around 25 officers in plainclothes surrounded his house at 11 p.m.,” Harrath said.
After a two-hour standoff, “they came into the house and he left with them.”
Seifeddine Makhlouf has been a prominent critic of Saied, who in July 2021 dissolved the parliament and seized far-reaching executive powers in what critics have called a “coup” and an attack on the only democracy to have emerged from the Arab Spring uprisings more than a decade ago.
Saied later took control of the judiciary and pushed through a new constitution giving his office almost unlimited powers.
Makhlouf in March 2021 led a group of Al-Karama MPs to Tunis airport in a bid to force authorities to lift a travel ban against a woman barred from boarding her flight, sparking a standoff that was widely shared online.
The court on Friday also sentenced several other Al-Karama members and a lawyer to shorter prison sentences, but they were not immediately detained.
The head of the National Salvation Front opposition alliance told journalists on Saturday that the rulings reflected “a mentality of vengeance.”
“We’re seeing the killing of freedoms and the destruction of democracy,” Ahmed Nejib Chebbi said. “There’s a desire to decapitate the leadership of the civilian and political opposition.”
