According to press sources, the judicial authorities in Tunisia have sentenced in absentia the head of the "Qalb Tounes" party, Nabil Karoui, and his brother, Ghazi, to six months in prison, on charges of surreptitiously crossing the border through the province of Kasserine, in the west of the country.
This came according to statements by Riyadh Al-Nuwiwi, the official spokesman for the Court of First Instance in Kasserine, the assistant undersecretary of the republic, made on Thursday to the private radio "Mosaique".
"The court of the district of Batala issued a sentence of 6 months in prison with immediate enforcement against the head of the Qalb Tounes party, Nabil Karoui and his brother, Ghazi Karoui, on charges of illegally leaving Tunisian soil through the state of Kasserine," Nouwi said, without further details.
In August 2021, Karoui and his brother, a member of the dissolved parliament, left the Tunisian border towards Algeria, which arrested them in Tebessa (east) to release them in October of the same year, and they leave for Europe without knowing their destination.
Radio Mosaique indicated that an (unnamed) person was kept in Kasserine, at the end of August 2021, on suspicion of smuggling Nabil Karoui and his brother Ghazi.
Nabil Karoui, a businessman, was a competitor to President Kais Saied in the second round of the Tunisian presidential elections in 2019, in addition to his leadership of the "Heart of Tunisia" party.
And at the end of last July, Tunisian President Kais Saied announced exceptional decisions to freeze parliament and lift the immunity of deputies.
Since that date, many deputies have been invited to investigate various cases, and some of them have been arrested.
Qalb Tounes and Ennahda, the two parties most represented in parliament, had a political struggle and sharp differences with President Said before he decided to freeze parliament.