Tunis (Reuters) -unisian Court sentenced Sahbi Atig, a excessive official Ennahda official, the principle opposition social gathering of the nation, to fifteen years in jail on costs of cash laundering, stated his lawyer on Friday, the final transfer towards opposition figures below President Kais Sieda.
Atig was arrested in 2023, one of many many Siedi opponents who had been imprisoned for the reason that president started to broaden his powers in 2021, dissolving Parliament and the sentence by decree in what critics reported as a coup.
Sieda stated that every one his steps are authorized and purpose to conclude years of rampant corruption and to think about accountable what he calls a corrupt elite.
Atig denied the accusations towards him, saying they’d been manufactured.
“The verdict goals to remove political opponents and lacks credible proof,” Atig’s lawyer Mokthar Jmaayi instructed Reuters.
“It is a continuation of the punishment of the opponents utilizing the judiciary and distracting folks from their actual issues,” he added.
The 15 -year sentence was shorter than some sentences issued lately. In April, a courtroom sentenced a sequence of opposition leaders, businessmen and attorneys below the age of 66, on costs of conspiracy.
Sieda dissolved the supreme judicial council and fired dozens of judges in 2022, elevating considerations about judicial independence.
The president claimed to not intrude within the judiciary and that his actions purpose to remove the judiciary of the corrupt judges.
Most of the leaders of the political events in Tunisia are in jail, together with Abir Moussi, chief of the free Constitutional Party, and Rached Ghanochi, the top of Ennahda – two of Sieda’s most necessary opponents.
(Report of Tarek Amaraedinging by Frances Kerry)
