Belkaeis Brahimi, the daughter of Mohamed Brahmi shouting outside a hospital after he was killed in Ariana, outside Tunis, yesterday.
TUNIS: Tunisian opposition politician Mohamed Brahmi was shot dead yesterday in the second such assassination this year, setting off violent protests against the Islamist-led government in the capital and elsewhere.
“This criminal gang has killed the free voice of Brahmi,” his widow Mbarka Brahmi said, without specifying who she thought was behind the shooting outside their home in Tunis.
Brahmi’s sister Souhiba accused the main Islamist Ennahda party of being behind the killing. Ennahda condemned the murder.
Mbarka said Brahmi had left the house after receiving a telephone call. She heard shots and found his body lying on the ground as two men fled on a motorcycle.
Brahmi belonged to the secular, Arab nationalist Popular Front party, whose then-leader, Chokri Belaid, was killed in a similar way on February 6. His death ignited the worst violence in Tunisia since president Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali fell in 2011.
Brahmi, 58, was a critic of the Ennahda-led ruling coalition and a member of the Constituent Assembly that has drafted a new constitution for the country.
The US State Department called for a “transparent and professional” investigation, while UN human rights chief Navi Pillay called for the killers to be brought to account.
Thousands protested outside the Interior Ministry in Tunis and the hospital in the Ariana district where Brahmi’s body had been taken. “Down with the rule of the Islamists,” they chanted, and demanded that the government resign. Despite the presence of hundreds of soldiers and police, protesters smashed cars and broke some windows of the hospital.
Similar demonstrations erupted in the southern town of Sidi Bouzid, the cradle of the Tunisian revolution, where protesters set fire to two local Ennahda party offices. Police fired teargas to disperse protesters who stormed a government office in the port of Sfax. Tunisia’s biggest labour organisation, UGTT, called for a general strike today in protest at the killing. National airline Tunisair said it had cancelled all its flights to and from Tunisia today. Reuters
