Rached Ghannouchi, the head of the main opposition party Ennahda and a vocal opponent of President Kais Saied, was sentenced to prison on Thursday by a Tunisian investigative judge, the politician’s attorney informed newsmen.
Ghannouchi, who was detained on Monday, is charged with attempting to undermine internal state security, and his imprisonment was decided after an eight-hour investigation, she continued.
Several prominent political personalities who accused Saied of staging a coup because of his actions to dissolve parliament and govern by decree prior to changing the constitution have been detained by police this year.
“It was a ready decision to imprison Ghannouchi only because of Ghannouchi’s expression of his opinion,” lawyer Monia Bouali told Reuters.
Ghannouchi’s official Facebook page published a comment by him after the judge’s decision, which said: “I am optimistic about the future … Tunisia is free”.
The 81-year-old served as speaker of the elected parliament until Saied shut it down in 2021 after seizing control.
Tuesday saw a ban on gatherings by Tunisian authorities at all Ennahda offices, an Islamist party, and a closure of the Salvation Front’s headquarters by police.
The move, according to Ennahda, will open the door for the party to be outlawed.
The United States claimed that the arrest of Ghannouchi, the closing of Ennahda’s headquarters, and the prohibition of opposition group gatherings marked a worrying escalation.
An interior ministry official said Ghannouchi had been arrested after “inciting statements”.
Ghannouchi said in an opposition meeting last week that “Tunisia without Ennahda, without political Islam, without the left, or any other component, is a project for civil war.”
The influential leader, who was in exile in the 1990s and returned during Tunisia’s 2011 revolution that brought democracy, said those who “celebrated the coup are extremists and terrorists”.
Over the past year, Ghannouchi has been the subject of numerous rounds of judicial questioning about claims about Ennahda’s finances and claims that the organisation assisted Islamists in traveling to Syria to engage in jihad, all of which they both rejected.