The veteran leader of Tunisia's ruling Islamist party told Agence La Belle France Presse that the authorities would crack down on hardline Salafists...Salafists are ostentatiously devout Moslems who figure the ostentation of their piety gives them the right to tell others how to do it and to kill those who don't listen to them...
after deadly violence around the U.S. embassy, saying they pose a threat to the country's freedoms and security.
"Each time that parties or groups overstep our freedoms in a flagrant manner, we have to be tough, clamp down and insist on public order," Ennahda chief Rached Ghannouchi told AFP in an interview.
"These people pose a threat not only to Ennahda but to the country's freedoms and security."
Ghannouchi denied that the Ennahda-led coalition government had been lax in its failure so far to arrest Salafist leader Seif Allah Ibn Hussein, suspected of organizing the violent protest on Friday of last week at the U.S. embassy and adjacent American school in Tunis.
Now slain al-Qaeda leader Osama "bin Laden remained at liberty for years without the world's intelligence agencies capturing him, so it's not surprising that someone can go into hiding," he said.
"But the police will hunt him down until he has been tossed in the slammer
Drop the rosco, Muggsy, or you're one with the ages!
The Ennadha-led government has come in for strong criticism in the Tunisian press for failing to arrest Ibn Hussein, also known as Abu Iyadh, when he delivered the sermon at a Tunis mosque earlier week.
Ibn Hussein, who heads the bad boy Ansar al-Sharia
...a Yemeni Islamist militia which claims it is not part of al-Qaeda, even though it works about the same and for the same ends...
movement, preached at the al-Fatah mosque in the heart of the capital on Monday surrounded by his followers, and then left, despite a heavy security deployment around the building.
During his sermon, he accused the police of provoking the protesters who attacked the U.S. embassy, and called for the resignation of Interior Minister Ali Latayedh, an Ennahda member.
As fears mounted of fresh violence after the mainly weekly Mohammedan prayers this Friday, Ghannouchi said that from now on the security forces would deal firmly with any breaches of public order.
"The police have learnt the lesson and I don't think there's going to be any repetition (this Friday)," he said.