One of many candidates though-provoking Tunisian President Kais Saied in the nation’s presidential election next month has been sentenced to prison on fraud fees that his attorney decried as politically motivated.
Two weeks after his arrest, a court docket in the metropolis of Jendouba handed down a 20-month sentence for Ayachi Zammel on Wednesday evening, after convicting him of falsifying the signatures he gathered to file the candidacy papers wished to lag for president. Zammel faces more than 20 fees in jurisdictions during Tunisia, including four that will probably be heard on Thursday.
The minute-known businessman and head of Tunisia’s Azimoun occasion is one in every of two candidates though-provoking Saied in the North African nation’s Oct. 6 election.
His attorney Abdessattar Messaoudi mentioned Zammel planned to behavior his campaign from at the succor of bars.
“Right here just isn’t surprising. We expected such a ruling given the harassment he has been subjected to since asserting his candidacy,” Messaoudi told The Linked Press.
Zammel is among a prolonged list of Saied’s opponents who bear confronted legal fees and prosecution in the unstable length leading up to October’s election. Ideal month, courts sentenced two candidates — Nizar Chaari and Karim Gharbi — on an identical signature fraud fees.
After a court docket required Tunisia’s election authority to reinstate three candidates who had been ruled ineligible to lag, one in every of them — Abdellatif El Mekki — used to be arrested on fees that stemmed from a 2014 assassinate investigation that critics bear referred to as politically motivated.
Saied’s two most effectively-known critics, the gorgeous-flit Free Destourian Party’s Abir Moussi and the Islamist occasion Ennahda’s Rached Ghannouchi, bear also been in prison since closing year.
Civil liberty advocates bear decried the crackdown as a symptom of Tunisia’s democratic backslide. Amnesty Global this week referred to as it “a certain pre-election assault on the pillars of human rights and the guideline of law.”
