By Michel Cousins.
Tripoli, 28 November:
Officials in Zintan have denied that Tunisian citizens have been seized and are being held as hostages . . .[restrict]in retaliation for the killing in the town of a local man, supposedly by three Tunisians. The Tunisian Foreign Ministry has also denied the allegations.
It has been reported in Tunisia that 16 Tunisians in Zintan were seized on Friday by a group of Zintanis connected to the dead man and that there were threats to kill them if the Tunisians did not name those supposedly responsible for the Libyan’s death. One Tunisian paper, Attounsia, claimed that 50 Tunisians had been seized. They were said to all be from the Tunisian city of Kairouan.
“The reports are not true”, Khaled Kor, a media spokesman for Zintan’s local council, told the Libya Herald today, Wednesday. “No one has been seized in Zintan. Tunisians are still coming to the town and still selling goods.”
According to reports in Tunisia, the dead Libyan, as yet unnamed, had tried to rape one of the alleged Tunisian killers at gunpoint. With the help of two relatives, the latter managed to overcome the man, then tied him to a tree left him there to die. Tunisian reports say that relatives of the dead man then went looking for all the Tunisians they could find in the town, threatening to kill them within 48 hours if the Tunisian community did not name the man’s killers.
On Monday, the Tunisian Foreign Ministry denied there had been any attacks on on Tunisians in Zintan. It said that all Tunisians living in Zintan were working normally and that the Tunisian Consulate in Tripoli was following investigations into the murder case in cooperation with the Libyan authorities.
Three Tunisians were reported to have been arrested following the killing but two were later released according to a source at the Tunisian Consulate in Tripoli.
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