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’s Islamist government.
The country’s leading union called for action after this latest death sparked protests in Tunisia.
Mohamed Brahmi, 58, of the leftist Popular Movement, was gunned down outside his home in Ariana, near Tunis.
“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.
The radio station said Brahmi had been struck by 11 bullets fired at point-blank range.
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.
It was not clear who carried out Thursday’s killing, but the ruling Ennahda party, a moderate Islamist group, was forced to deny accusations from his family that it had been involved.
“I accuse Ennahda. It was them who killed him,” Brahmi’s sister Chhiba Brahmi told reporters at the family home in Sidi Bouzid, without providing any evidence.
“Our family had the feeling that Mohamed would suffer the same fate as Chokri Belaid,” whose family also blamed the authorities, she said.
france24
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