Tunisia has banned families, lawyers from seeing Ghannouchi after the fall of prison | Political Affairs

There has been no word on Tunisian opposition leader Ghannouchi for 11 days, his son told Al Jazeera.

The son of jailed Tunisian opposition leader Rached Ghannouchi says his family and lawyers have not been able to see or contact the 85-year-old for 11 days since he was hospitalized after collapsing in prison.

In an interview with Al Jazeera on Monday, Moadh Ghannouchi said that the last time lawyers saw his father a few days before his temporary departure on July 17, requests to visit him at the hospital, including those made to the prosecutor, were denied, leaving the family with no confirmation of his whereabouts or condition.

He said: “It is as if a person has been forcibly disappeared.

Ghannouchi said her father, who suffers from high blood pressure and breathing problems, was left at high risk in the airless prison.

He said: “We see the government officials as the ones responsible for his illness,” he said, saying that his father’s detention in a very hot prison was intended to harm his health.

“It wasn’t enough to arrest him – they want to torture him again,” Moadh told Al Jazeera.

“This is worrying for us and for him because he always has several visits every week from lawyers and relatives – so it’s been 11 days without leaving anything, any visits, for anyone.”

Ghannouchi said conflicting rumors have circulated on social media, with some placing his father in the Rabta government hospital in Tunis, others in a military hospital, and others saying he suffered a heart attack. But the family has not received any official notification, he said, while officials are refusing to be contacted.

In a statement on his official Facebook page on Monday, Ghannouchi’s security team asked about his condition. A spokesman for the Ennahda party told Al Jazeera that it does not know what hospital he is in or his health.

The former speaker of the parliament and the most prominent person who was arrested in the attack of President Kais Saied on the opposition was arrested from April 2023 later. receive a life sentence which his supporters say was political. Saied’s government denies that the prosecution of the opposition is politically motivated.

Rached Ghannouchi He lost consciousness last week when the temperature inside the Mornaguia prison rises, according to Haifa Chebbi, the daughter of another imprisoned protester. He said he witnessed the incident and that the temperature reached 52C (126F). His lawyers said on Thursday that his condition is “serious”.

The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention previously found Ghannouchi’s detention unreasonable and called for his immediate release, a decision his son said authorities ignored.

On Sunday, the National Salvation Front, the main opposition coalition, urged the authorities to report on his health and Amnesty International called for the protection of prisoners during the heat.