Tunisia arrest journo again
2009-09-19 20:04
New York - A Tunisian Islamist journalist freed last month from 18 years in prison and internal exile was re-arrested this week, according to a rights group calling for the government to end his harassment.
Human Rights Watch said Abdallah Zouari, first arrested in 1991 in a crackdown against an Islamist party to which he belonged, was detained and held for questioning on September 15 in Hassi Jerbi, the remote village 500km from his family where he had spent the past seven years in forced exile after his release from 11 years in jail.
"The Tunisian authorities say they have lifted the travel restrictions on Zouari, but the police are still trailing him and doing everything they can to impede his human rights activities," Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW's Middle East and North Africa director, said in a statement released late Friday.
Complained about surveillance
The New York-based rights monitor said plainclothes police arrested Zouari outside a village post office, where he had gone to mail a complaint to the interior minister about unrelenting surveillance.
After taking him to a police station, they demanded he sign an affidavit saying he would not write articles that "defame the state and threaten its security", but he refused, Zouari told HRW.
Police threatened him with violence and then released him at 22:00 without charge, about nine hours after the arrest.
"If President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali wants the October 25 presidential elections to appear as something more than the hollow exercise it has been in the past, he should ensure an end to this intensive police harassment of those who, like Zouari, dare to criticise openly the government's practices," Whitson said.
Former Islamist militant
After serving his prison time, Zouari, a onetime Islamist militant and former journalist on the weekly al-Fajr (Dawn), was ordered to live in Hassi Jerbi in the far southeast of the country, while his family was in Tunis.
The National Council for Freedoms in Tunisia (CNLT) has said that since his release in 2002 he had been subjected to constant harassment, including being denied visits by his wife and children.
Zouari was arrested in 1991 and sentenced to 11 years in jail by a military court as part of a crackdown against the banned Islamic Ennahda movement.
- SAPA