Tunisia was facing a possible general strike Friday following the assassination of leading leftist opposition figure Mohamed Brahmi on Thursday, the second political assassination this year of a politician opposed to the country\u2019s Islamist government.<\/p>\n
The country\u2019s leading union called for action after this latest death sparked protests in Tunisia.<\/p>\n
Mohamed Brahmi, 58, of the leftist Popular Movement, was gunned down outside his home in Ariana, near Tunis.<\/p>\n
“He was riddled with bullets in front of his wife and children,” Mohsen Nabti, a fellow member of the small leftist movement, said in an emotional account aired on Tunisian radio.<\/p>\n
The radio station said Brahmi had been struck by 11 bullets fired at point-blank range.<\/p>\n
The assassination bore all the hallmarks of the February 6 killing of Chokri Belaid, another leftist opposition figure, which sparked a political crisis in Tunisia and charges of government connivance.<\/p>\n
It was not clear who carried out Thursday\u2019s killing, but the ruling Ennahda party, a moderate Islamist group, was forced to deny accusations from his family that it had been involved.<\/p>\n
“I accuse Ennahda. It was them who killed him,” Brahmi\u2019s sister Chhiba Brahmi told reporters at the family home in Sidi Bouzid, without providing any evidence.<\/p>\n
“Our family had the feeling that Mohamed would suffer the same fate as Chokri Belaid,” whose family also blamed the authorities, she said.<\/p>\n
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