A Tunisian court on Wednesday sentenced 4 individuals to death and 2 to life imprisonment for the assassination of Tunisian politician Shukri Belaid 11 years ago, marking the first political assassination in the country in decades. Belaid was shot dead on February 6, 2013, in front of his house with four gunshots in the Ariana region of the Tunisian capital. His assassination shocked the Tunisian political class, leading to the resignation of Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali.
Belaid, a leftist politician, was a vocal critic of the Islamic Ennahda party, accusing it of turning a blind eye to violence perpetrated by extremists against secularists. He was killed by armed attackers while in his car. Salafist extremists were implicated in his assassination, particularly the "Ansar al-Sharia" organization, which denied any involvement, claiming, "The organization is innocent of Shukri Belaid's blood and that those who assassinated him are remnants of the deposed president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's intelligence, working to plunge the country into chaos and strife to avoid accountability and prevent the opening of serious files."
In 2013, the Tunisian government announced that the relevant security authorities had identified those involved in Belaid's assassination, confirming on August 4, 2013, that one of the suspects had been arrested in Hammam Sousse city.
Shukri Belaid's media presence increased after the revolution that erupted in 2010 as he strongly criticized the coalition that governed Tunisia following the elections for the Constituent Assembly, primarily targeting the Ennahda Movement, accusing it of failing to lead the transitional phase and seeking to dominate institutions and the political scene. He also criticized the party for its leniency towards extremists, accusing it in his last television appearance on February 5, 2013, on Nessma TV of legitimizing political assassination.
Lawyer Abdeslam Al-Aouini, a member of Belaid’s defense team, revealed that a death threat letter against Belaid arrived days before the assassination, but the responsible security officers at that time, when Ali Larayedh was the Minister of the Interior, treated the matter with total indifference, according to him. Al-Aouini stated that the defense team has been in a struggle for 11 years against systems that do not want the truth to be revealed, emphasizing that the files of the accused and their operational names were only reviewed during this period, which will lead the defense to search for additional evidence of several political entities' involvement in the assassination and their attempts to conceal all facts to avoid condemnation, noting that the Tunisian judiciary faces the details of an unusual trial for an unusual murder.
