Supporters of the Islamist Ennahda movement wave flags as they chant slogans and hold a picture of assassinated politician Mohamed Brahmi during a demonstration in Tunis, yesterday.
TUNIS: Protests and a general strike swept Tunisia yesterday after gunmen killed an opposition head with “the same gun” used to kill a colleague, as under-fire authorities pointed to Al Qaeda links.
Mohamed Brahmi was gunned down with the same weapon used to kill another opposition politician, Chokri Belaid, six months earlier, Interior Minister Lotfi Ben Jeddou said.
He said the main suspect in Brahmi’s killing was a member of a radical Sunni Muslim Salafist movement linked to Al Qaeda.
“The first elements of the investigation show the implication of Boubaker Hakim, a Salafist extremist,” he said a day after Brahmi was gunned down outside his home near Tunis by two gunmen on a motorcycle.
The 30-year-old Paris-born chief suspect was already wanted in Tunisia for kidnapping and arms trafficking, the minister said. Public security chief Mustapha Taieb Ben Amor named 14 radical Islamist suspects — including four behind bars — implicated in the two political killings.
“The suspects are radical extremists, and some of them belong to Ansar
Al Sharia,” the main Salafist group in Tunisia, Ben Jeddou said.
Meanwhile, with many streets in the capital deserted, national airline Tunisair and European carriers cancelled flights as street protests were expected amid allegations of government connivance in the killing.
In rival shows of force, thousands of pro-government demonstrators held a solidarity rally in Tunis. Brahmi, 58, an MP with the leftist and nationalist Popular Movement, was assassinated outside his home in Ariana, near the capital.
The state prosecutor’s office said an autopsy found that Brahmi, whose family and political colleagues said would be buried as a “martyr” today, had been cut down by a hail of 14 bullets.
Balkis Brahmi, 19, one of his five children, said he was killed by two men in black on a motorbike.
“At around midday, we heard gunfire and my father crying with pain. We rushed out — my brother, mother and I — to find his body riddled with bullets at the wheel of his car parked in front of the house,” she said.
As news of the killing spread, angry protesters took to the streets in both Tunis and Sidi Bouzid, Brahmi’s hometown.
According to analyst Sami Brahem, “the reasons behind the assassination of Chokri Belaid are the same as those which led to the murder of Mohamed Brahmi: to bring about the failure of the democratic transition.”
Belaid’s February 6 assassination, also outside his home, sparked a political crisis and charges of Ennahda involvement.
Beji Caid Essebsi, head of the main opposition party Nidaa Tounes, said Ennahda was to blame because it had failed to identify Belaid’s killers.
“There has not been any serious judicial action,” he said.
The General Union of Tunisian Labour (UGTT) called Friday’s general strike in protest at “terrorism, violence and murders”.
Tunisia’s presidency said yesterday was being marked as a day of national mourning following the assassination.
Like after the Belaid murder, Ennahda was back in the firing line of accusations.
But Ennahda chief Rached Ghannouchi in a statement called the killing “a catastrophe for Tunisia”.
“Those behind this crime want to lead the country towards civil war and to disrupt the democratic transition.” Political tension has been rising in Tunisia, with the launch of its own version of the Tamarod (rebellion) movement in Egypt that led to the ouster of Islamist president Mohammed Mursi on July 3.
The party of Kamed Morjane, a former minister under ousted president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, announced yesterday its deputies were withdrawing from parliament and demanded the assembly’s dissolution.
AFP
