The jailed leader of Tunisian opposition party Ennahdha, Rached Ghannouchi, 82, has begun a hunger strike to protest his detention and express support for other "political prisoners", his party said.
Ghannouchi, "decided to begin a three-day hunger strike to denounce the arbitrary and unfounded prosecution of the opposition", Imed Khemiri, spokesman for the Ennahdha party, said on Friday.
A court in the North African country sentenced Ghannouchi to one year in prison on terrorism-related charges in May following his arrest the month before, in what his party condemned as an "unjust political verdict."
He is the most prominent of roughly two dozen opponents of President Kais Saied arrested since February, including former ministers and business figures.
"It is also in support of the hunger strike started by Jawhar Ben Mbarek," he said, referring to the left-wing opposition figure and leading member of the National Salvation Front (FSN) opposition alliance.
Ben Mbarek, a critic of Saied who has been under arrest since February 24, has been on a hunger strike for four days to denounce his "unjust" detention, according to his sister, the lawyer Dalila Masaddek.
'Political Prisoners'
"Faced with the government's determination to dismiss opponents through baseless legal cases, the only option left to political prisoners is to go on hunger strike," said Khemiri.
Rached Ghannouchi is also accused of plotting against state security along with other detained opposition figures who accuse Saied of a coup for shutting down the elected parliament and moving to rule by decree.
President Saied, who enshrined his new powers in a constitution that he passed through a referendum with a low turnout last year, has denied his actions were a coup and said they were needed to save Tunisia from years of chaos.
He has called his critics criminals, traitors and terrorists and warned that any judge who freed them would be considered abetting them.
Ghannouchi, a political prisoner and exile before the 2011 revolution that brought democracy, was parliament speaker from the 2019 election until Saied sent tanks to shut down the chamber in 2021.
Police have detained more than 20 political figures this year, including Ghannouchi, accusing some of plotting against state security.
