Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of the Ennahda party and the president Kais Saied‘s most vocal critic, was held by Tunisian police on Monday, according to his party, escalating a campaign of arrests that has been targeting Saied’s major critics.
Party leaders informed reporters that after displaying a court order, police entered the party headquarters, removed everyone inside, and began a search that would take days.
On Monday evening, police stormed Ghannouchi’s home and searched it before escorting him to what the Islamist Ennahda described as a “unknown destination.”
“It is an attempt to hit Ennahda and opposition parties. We have a fear that it will be a prelude to a freeze on the party,” Riadh Chaibi, a senior party official told reporters.
Leading political figures who accuse Saied of staging a coup for his plans to dissolve the elected parliament in 2021 and proceed to rule by decree before revising the constitution have been imprisoned by police this year.
The United States and rights organizations have expressed alarm over the prior arrests that resulted in accusations of plotting against state security.
According to a representative of the interior ministry, the public prosecutor looking into “inciting statements” had ordered the search of Ghannouchi’s home and the summoning of Ghannouchi for questioning.
The opposition meeting on Saturday featured Ghannouchi, who declared: “Tunisia without Ennahda, without political Islam, without the left, or without any other component, is a project for civil war.”
The 81-year-old said those who “celebrated the coup are extremists and terrorists,” referring to individuals who went into exile in the 1990s and came back during Tunisia’s 2011 revolution that delivered democracy.
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 organization assisted Islamists in traveling to Syria to engage in jihad, all of which he and the organisation reject.
The largest political party leader to challenge Saied since he assumed sweeping authority, which the president claims was necessary to preserve Tunisia from years of crises.