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Lawyers denounce ‘fabricated’ Tunisia trial of opposition

Lawyers and relatives on Monday denounced the hefty sentences handed down to Tunisian opposition figures in last week’s mass trial as “fabricated” and “unfounded”, and said they will appeal.A court in Tunis in the early hours of Saturday handed down jail terms of up to 66 years to around 40 defendants, including vocal critics of President Kais Saied.They were accused of “conspiracy against state security” and “belonging to a terrorist group” among other charges, according to their lawyers.Defence lawyer Samir Dilou said on Monday the trial was “unprecedented in Tunisia” as “it handed the defendants a total of 892 years in prison”.He said key evidence in the case was still missing, as lawyers had complained that they did not have full access to the case file.”They still haven’t told us how the defendants conspired against the state,” Dilou told journalists.He said an appeal could be filed as early as Tuesday.Among those sentenced were well-known opposition figures, lawyers and business people. Some have already been in prison for two years while others are in exile or still free.Several were arrested in February 2023, after which Saied labelled them “terrorists”.Abdennasser Mehri, another defence lawyer, called the trial a “blatant violation of the law”.”It’s a fabricated, unfounded case with a plan set in advance,” he said. “The scales of justice are broken.”Dilou said Ahmed Souab, also a defence lawyer, was arrested early Monday after police raided his home.Local media said he was accused of “threatening to commit terrorist crimes” in a statement made on Saturday after the trial, criticising political pressure judges were allegedly under.Online videos showed Souab saying that “knives are not on the necks of detainees, but on the neck of the judge issuing the ruling”.Souab, a former judge, is expected to remain in detention “for five days and he won’t be allowed to communicate with his lawyers for 48 hours”, Dilou told AFP.Human Rights Watch said on Saturday the court “did not give even a semblance of a fair trial” to the defendants.Defence lawyer Dalila Msaddek said the trial was used “to lump together everyone they wanted to get rid of”.Politicians Issam Chebbi and Jawhar Ben Mbarek of the opposition National Salvation Front coalition, as well as lawyer Ridha Belhaj and activist Chaima Issa, were sentenced to 18 years behind bars.Activist Khayam Turki was handed a 48-year term and businessman Kamel Eltaief received the harshest penalty — 66 years in prison, according to lawyers.Some defendants are abroad and were tried in absentia, like French intellectual Bernard Henri-Levy who received a 33-year jail term, lawyers said.Since Saied launched a power grab in the summer of 2021 and assumed total control, rights advocates and opposition figures have decried a rollback of freedoms in the North African country where the 2011 Arab Spring began.

Bells toll for Francis in jihadist-scarred Iraq

Church bells tolled in Mosul and nearby towns Monday to mark the death of Pope Francis, the first pope to visit Iraq which suffered greatly at the hands of jihadists.In the historic Al-Tahera church in the nearby town of Qaraqosh, where the Pope prayed in 2021, dozens of worshippers gathered for an Easter mass which also became an occasion to pay tribute to their beloved Francis.Near the altar stood an empty wooden chair on which the pope had sat when he declared in a mass that he had entrusted the town’s “rebirth” to the Virgin Mary.His death “is a significant setback for Christians, especially in the Middle East”, said Kadun Yuhana as he mourned a pope who had kept “a watchful eye on the region, much like a father to his children”.Yuhana, in his sixties, recalled with “profound love” the pope’s historic visit to Qaraqosh, where the jihadists had ransacked and burned churches and smashed crosses.”We were very happy that he visited his children in this small village, whose population has dwindled due to the emigration of thousands because of the injustice.”In 2014, the Islamic State group swept through Iraq’s Nineveh plains, home to one of the oldest Christian communities in the world.Within days, nearly all of Qaraqosh’s 55,000 Christian residents had fled.Boutros Mazen, a medical assistant, praised the “fraternity and love” fostered by Pope Francis during his visit to Iraq.”He left something good to the Iraqi people: their cohesion and unity,” he said.By the time of Francis’s visit, Iraq’s Christian population had shrunk during years of violence in the country to fewer than 400,000 — from around 1.5 million before the US-led invasion of 2003.During his visit, the late pope met Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Shiite Islam’s highest authority in Iraq.It was a landmark moment in modern religious history, and for Francis’s efforts to deepen interfaith dialogue.In Mosul, he prayed for the victims of war and pleaded for Christians in Iraq and the Middle East to stay in their homelands.Sanaa Abdul Karim, who had fled the jihadists’ rule in Mosul to the northern city of Dohuk, described the pope’s death as a “tragedy”, praising his “humility” when he visited her hometown.It is an “extraordinary loss… we are deeply moved by it, particularly because he supported the return of Christians to Iraq,” she said.burs-cbg/rh/srm