TUNIS: Liberal party leader Nabil Karoui, runner-up in Tunisia’s 2019 presidential election that saw Kais Saied elected, has been arrested in Algeria along with his MP brother, media reports said on Monday.
The privately owned Radio Mosaique FM said border police arrested the Qalb Tounes party chief and his brother Ghazi Karoui in the Tebessa region of northeast Algeria. Senior party official Oussama Khelifi told reporters “official information” was still being awaited. The arrest of the brothers has not yet been confirmed by the authorities in either country.
“We have not heard from Karoui for a week,” Khelifi said.
Riadh Al-Nouioui, spokesman for Kasserine court in central Tunisia, said that “the authorities are investigating two people suspected of helping the Karoui brothers escape” to Algeria.
Nabil Karoui founded the private Tunisian channel Nessma TV, which is partly owned by Italy’s former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Karoui has been under investigation since 2017 in a money laundering and tax evasion case.
He was arrested in 2019 and spent more than a month in prison at the height of the presidential election campaign.
He was freed but rearrested last December and spent six months in pre-trial detention before being let out again in June 2021. Karoui’s presidential campaign focused on the fight against poverty and his opposition to Islamist politics despite allying himself with the Ennahda party.
He lost out to Saied, a retired law professor and political newcomer, as the electorate rejected the political class that had ruled since the 2011 revolution.
On July 25, Saied dismissed parliament, sacked the prime minister and granted himself sweeping powers, invoking the constitution as justification.
Since then, there has been a wave of travel bans and house arrests targeting parliamentarians, magistrates and businessmen in an anti-corruption purge that has raised fears of a decline in freedoms.
Tunisian ex-presidential contender held in Algeria
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Tunisian ex-presidential contender held in Algeria
- Nabil Karoui founded the private Tunisian channel Nessma TV, which is partly owned by Italy’s former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi
UNRWA says food distribution in Rafah suspended due to insecurity
DUBAI: The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said on Tuesday that food distribution in Gaza’s southern city of Rafah were currently suspended due to lack of supplies and insecurity.
Simultaneous Israeli assaults on the southern and northern edges of the Gaza Strip this month have caused a new exodus of hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, and sharply restricted the flow of aid, raising the risk of famine.
Cyprus says maritime aid shipments to Gaza ‘on track’
- 1,000 tons of aid were shipped from Cyprus to the besieged Palestinian territory between Friday and Sunday
- The vessels were shuttling between Gaza and the east Mediterranean island
NICOSIA: Four ships from the United States and France are transporting aid from Larnaca port to the Gaza Strip amid the spiralling humanitarian crisis there, the Cyprus presidency said on Tuesday.
Victor Papadopoulos from the presidential press office told state radio 1,000 tons of aid were shipped from Cyprus to the besieged Palestinian territory between Friday and Sunday.
He said the vessels were shuttling between Gaza and the east Mediterranean island, a distance of about 360 kilometers (225 miles).
Large quantities of aid from Britain, Romania, the United Arab Emirates, the United States and other countries have accumulated at Larnaca port.
Cyprus President Nikos Christodoulides told reporters on Tuesday the maritime aid effort was “on track.”
“We have substantial assistance from third countries that want to contribute to this effort,” he said.
The aid shipped from Cyprus is entering Gaza via a temporary US-built floating pier, where the shipments are offloaded for distribution.
The United Nations has warned of famine as Gaza’s 2.4 million people face shortages of food, safe water, medicines and fuel amid the Israel-Hamas war that has devastated the coastal territory.
Aid deliveries by truck have slowed to a trickle since Israeli forces took control of the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing with Egypt in early May.
The war in Gaza broke out after Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7, which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
Two days after the war broke out, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” on the Gaza Strip.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive against Hamas has killed at least 35,647 people in Gaza, also mostly civilians, according to figures provided by the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
Daesh attack in Syria kills three soldiers: war monitor
- The militants “attacked a site where... regime forces were stationed“
- The Syrian army had sent forces to the area, where Daesh attacks are common
BEIRUT: Daesh group militants killed three Syrian soldiers in an attack Tuesday on an army position in the Badia desert, a war monitor said.
The militants “attacked a site where... regime forces were stationed,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, adding that a lieutenant colonel and two soldiers died.
The Syrian army had sent forces to the area, where Daesh attacks are common, ahead of an expected wider sweep, said the Britain-based Observatory which has a network of sources inside the country.
In an attack on May 3, Daesh fighters killed at least 15 Syrian pro-government fighters when they targeted three military positions in the desert, the Observatory had reported.
Daesh overran large swathes of Syria and Iraq in 2014, proclaiming a so-called caliphate and launching a reign of terror.
It was defeated territorially in Syria in 2019, but its remnants still carry out deadly attacks, particularly against pro-government forces and Kurdish-led fighters in Badia desert.
Syria’s war has claimed more than half a million lives and displaced millions more since it erupted in March 2011 with Damascus’s brutal repression of anti-government protests.
At least 9 Egyptian women and children die when vehicle slides off ferry and plunges into Nile River
At least 9 Egyptian women and children die when vehicle slides off ferry and plunges into Nile River
- The accident, which happened in Monshat el-Kanater town in Giza province, also injured nine other passengers
CAIRO: At least nine Egyptian women and children died Tuesday when a small bus carrying about two dozen people slid off a ferry and plunged into the Nile River just outside Cairo, health authorities said.
The accident, which happened in Monshat el-Kanater town in Giza province, injured nine other passengers, the Health Ministry said in a statement. Giza is one of three provinces forming Greater Cairo.
Six of the injured were treated at the site while three others were transferred to hospitals. The ministry didn’t elaborate on their injuries.
A list of the nine dead obtained by The Associated Press showed four were minors.
Giza provincial Gov. Ahmed Rashed said the bus was retrieved from the river and rescue efforts were still underway as of midday Tuesday.
The cause of the accident was not immediately clear.
According to the state-owned Akhbar daily, about two dozen passengers, mostly women, were in the vehicle heading to work when the accident occurred. It said security forces detained the vehicle driver.
Ferry, railway and road accidents are common in Egypt, mainly because of poor maintenance and lack of regulations. In February, a ferry carrying day laborers sank in the Nile in Giza, killing at least 10 of the 15 people on board.
Syrian first lady Asma Assad has leukemia, presidency says
- Statement stated that Asma would undergo a special treatment protocol that would require her to isolate
DUBAI: Syria’s first lady, Asma Assad, has been diagnosed with leukemia, the Syrian presidency said on Tuesday, almost five years after she announced she had fully recovered from breast cancer.
The statement said Asma, 48, would undergo a special treatment protocol that would require her to isolate, and that she would step away from public engagements as a result.
In August 2019, Asma said she had fully recovered from breast cancer that she said had been discovered early.
Since Syria plunged into war in 2011, the British-born former investment banker has taken on the public role of leading charity efforts and meeting families of killed soldiers, but has also become hated by the opposition.
She runs the Syria Trust for Development, a large NGO that acts as an umbrella organization for many of the aid and development operations in Syria.
Last year, she accompanied her husband, President Bashar Assad ,on a visit to the United Arab Emirates, her first known official trip abroad with him since 2011. She met Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak, the Emirati president’s mother, during a trip seen as a public signal of her growing role in public affairs.
