TUNIS, Aug 28, 2012 (AFP)
TUNIS, Aug 28, 2012 (AFP)
TV boss Sami Fehri, an associate of the ousted president’s family, has turned himself into an unlikely champion of press freedom and victim of the Islamist-led government in the new Tunisia.
Fehri insists the judiciary is seeking his detention in retaliation for the satirical puppet show broadcast by his Ettounsiya TV channel that was abruptly pulled last week because of “pressures” from the ruling Islamist party Ennahda.
“A huge machine has crushed us to death,” he told the Express FM radio station last week, saying the government had “crossed every red line.”
Fehri’s lawyer, Sonia Dahmani, said her client was still free on Monday, with the police and the accused yet to be formally notified of his arrest warrant.
The authorities have sharply criticised the TV programme.
But they say its transmission is unrelated to the legal process dogging Fehri, a former business partner of Belhassen Trabelsi, the brother-in-law of ousted president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who fled to Canada.
The two men have been named in a corruption case targeting their production company Cactus and state television.
The official TAP news agency said Fehri was being charged with the “illegal use of Tunisian state television resources” during the Ben Ali era.
And an influential advisor to the prime minister, Lotfi Zitoune, charges Fehri is a “criminal” and “a symbol of the former regime, implicated in corruption, who should return the considerable sums of money that he owes to the state.”
But the National Union of Tunisian Journalists (SNJT) is not convinced.
“The SNJT insists on opening the corruption files in the information sector and charging those implicated, but it is surprised that the arrest warrant (against Fehri) coincides” with the move to shut down a TV show that poked fun at Tunisian politics, the union said.
“Using the judiciary and government intervention to put pressure on the media is a blow to freedom of expression” in Tunisia, it added.
— Media muzzling or justice? —
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