Tunisia's MPs Call to Designate Muslim Brotherhood as Terrorist Organization

Tunisia's Free Constitutional Party (Free Destourian Party) has called on parliament to designate the Muslim brotherhood as a terrorist organization, Saudi-owned news outlet Al-Sharq al-Awsat reported on Tuesday.

A petition has been submitted to the Tunisian parliament to this end by head of the Tunisian opposition figure and President of the Free Destourian Party (PDL) Abeer Moussi.

“Today we want a clear political position. Political parties and politicians who want to openly dissociate themselves from the Muslim Brotherhood organization must prove so and vote in favor of this draft motion,” it quoted Moussi as saying.

Moussi also added that belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood and receiving funding from the organization is a “threat to national sovereignty."

The Muslim Brotherhood's activity in Tunisia is linked to the political party Ennahda.

The Turkish-backed Islamist Ennahda party has been accused of working in support of the Muslim Brotherhood in western Libya.

In an interview with Sky News Arabia, the Party's MP, Awatef Quraish, confirmed that the party’s leader, Moussa, had submitted the draft to the Tunisian Parliament.

Quraish explained that the Party's move aims to designate the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization against the civil state.

The MP Quraish called on the Tunisian government to "declare the Brotherhood a terrorist organization and consider every Tunisian who belongs to them as a threat to the state's civilization according to the anti-terrorism law.

She said: "We consider the Brotherhood, which does not owe allegiance to the homeland but to the group, a terrorist organization, committing terrorist crimes in Tunisia.

Quraish condemned the understandings of the head of the Ennahda movement, Rashid Ghannouchi, with the head of the Libyan Al-Wefaq government, Fayez al-Sarraj, and others inside the government.

She said that Tunisia's parliament speaker Al-Ghannouchi's movements with Al-Sarraj are condemned by all standards.

She emphasized that the economic interests of the Tunisian state "are not within the role of Ghannouchi, but rather are of the President of the Republic, the Prime Minister and the ministers working in the field of economic diplomacy."

Earlier, the Tunisian parliament held a session over suspicious role played by Parliament Speaker Ghannouchi in Libya, and on Tunisian diplomacy, where representatives called for withdrawing confidence from him.

The movement’s leader, Ghannouchi, after frequent contacts with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his congratulations to the Al-Sarraj government and its militias, for controlling parts of Libyan soil, has become a provocation for all the major political forces in the country.