TUNIS (Reuters) – Tunisian police arrested Abir Moussi, a prominent opponent of President Kais Saied, at the entrance to the presidential palace on Tuesday, her lawyer and an aide said.
“What happened was a kidnapping in front of the presidency, and she is being held at the police station …”, lawyer Nafaa Laribi said.
An assistant of Moussi said in a video on Facebook that Moussi was “kidnapped” in front of the Carthage Palace.
Authorities were not immediately available to comment.
Moussi leads the Free Constitutional Party and is a supporter of late president Zine El Abidine ben Ali who was toppled by mass protests in 2011.
In front of the La Goulette police station, dozens of angry Moussi supporters protested, shouting slogans against Saied amid a heavy police contingent who cordoned off the building.
Earlier on Tuesday, Moussi said in a video that she went to the presidential reception office to file an appeal in local elections expected at the end of the year. She said that this step was necessary so that she could later file an appeal in the Administrative Court.
Saied, a retired law professor who was elected president in 2019, shut down the elected parliament in 2021 and moved to rule by decree, actions his opponents described as a coup. Saied has said he needed to save Tunisia from years of chaos, denying his actions were a coup.
On Friday, jailed opposition leader Rached Ghannouchi, another critic of Saied, began a three-day hunger strike in support of other imprisoned opposition figures, his Islamist Ennahda party said.
(Reporting by Tarek Amara; editing by Grant McCool)
