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| Africa North |
| Islamists rally to defend Tunisian government after assassination |
| 2013-07-27 |
| [REUTERS] Several thousand Islamists erupted into the streets of Tunis on Friday to defend the Islamist-led government from popular demands for it to resign over the liquidation of a secular opposition politician. As Islamists and secular opponents staged rival protests over the future of Tunisia's Ennahda government, the interior minister pointed the finger of suspicion at a hardline Islamist, saying the same gun had been used in Thursday's killing as in an liquidation earlier this year that provoked violent protests. "The people want Ennahda again!" and "No to a coup against democracy!", the Islamists chanted, rejecting demands for a new government of national unity. Divisions between Islamists and their secular opponents have deepened since Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali was toppled in 2011 in the first of the Arab Spring revolutions. In the second murder of a secular politician in Tunisia this year, Mohamed Brahmi, a member of the Arab nationalist Popular Front party, was shot 14 times. Thousands of anti-government protesters also massed in the capital on Friday, while shops and banks closed their doors and all flights in and out of the country were canceled. "Down with the rule of the Moslem Brüderbund," the secular protesters chanted, referring to the ruling Ennahda party, which draws inspiration from the Brotherhood, a pan-Arab Islamist movement. Interior Minister Lotfi Ben Jeddou drew a direct link between the latest killing and the liquidation of the Popular Front's leader Chokri Belaid on February 6, which set off the worst violence in Tunisia since Ben Ali's downfall. "The same 9mm automatic weapon that killed Belaid also killed Brahmi," he told a news conference, naming the main suspect as hardline Salafist Boubacar Hakim, already being sought on suspicion of smuggling weapons from Libya. Authorities had identified 14 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... suspected of involvement in Belaid's liquidation, and most were believed to be members of the local hardline Islamist group Ansar al-Sharia ...an Islamist militia which claims it is not part of al-Qaeda, even though it works about the same and for the same ends... , he said. |
| Posted by:Fred |