Tunisian police have fired teargas and shots into the air to disperse radical Islamists protesters who gathered in Tunis to support the hardline Islamist group Ansar al-Sharia, despite the rally being banned.
Violence broke out in the central city of Kairouan and in the
capital, Tunis.
Clashes in the Tunis suburb of Ettadhamen erupted between nearly
500 supporters of Ansar al-Sharia and law enforcements as
protesters started throwing stones.
The Salafis were chanting, “The rule of the tyrant
should fall,” according to Reuters.
Teargas was also reportedly used in Kairouan, as Salafis threw
stones at the police from behind the wall of a mosque.
Group’s spokesman Seifeddine Rais, the group’s spokesman, was
arrested at dawn on Sunday as he went jogging in front of police,
according to a police source, who described his behavior as a
“provocation,” Al Jazeera reported.
The annual rally was expected to have drawn up more than 40,000
people to attend this year’s annual congress.
The recent protest that turned violent comes two days after the
government banned the Islamist group from holding its annual
congress in the central city of Kairouan.
On Friday the government ruled the group had “shown disdain for
state institutions” and was “a threat to public
security”.
“The congress is postponed to another date undecided yet,”
Habib Al-Lawz, a leader from the ruling Ennahda party, told a local
Radio station on Saturday.
Despite the ban, the group vowed the meeting would take place,
but said they would gather at a different location, in an
impoverished suburb of Tunis instead of Kairouan, where security
forces were deployed in strength on Saturday.
On its Facebook page, Ansar al-Sharia notified its supporters the
congress has been moved to Ettadhamen.
Earlier, the movement told to stay away from Kairouan.
“To the attention of our brothers who are coming to Kairouan
from other regions… the head of Ansar al-Sharia informs you of
the need to cancel all these trips given the seriousness of the
security situation,” the group said on its website.
Source Article from http://rt.com/news/tunisia-tear-gas-islamists-496/
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