Tunisia Links Assassination to Qaeda Cell

The government on Friday blamed a violent Islamist extremist cell linked to Al Qaeda for the killing of a top Tunisian political opposition leader and identified the chief suspect, a Parisian-born jihadist, as the person who had killed an opposition figure in February, saying he used the same automatic pistol in both assassinations.

The assertions, made by Interior Minister Lotfi Ben Jeddou, came as outrage simmered over the killing of the opposition leader, Mohamed Brahmi, a liberal politician, outside his home on Thursday, witnessed by his wife and children. The public prosecutor’s office said an autopsy showed that Mr. Brahmi, 58, had been hit with 14 bullets from a 9-millimeter weapon, six in his upper body and the others in his left leg.

The assassination of Mr. Brahmi, an outspoken critic of Ennahda, the moderate Islamist party in power, has plunged Tunisia into a new political crisis and revealed a deepening split between Tunisians who want a pluralistic democracy and hard-line Islamists who reject such a system.

Many Ennahda opponents say the party has created an atmosphere of tolerance for Islamist extremists that has given them license to carry out assassinations and intimidation of political figures who disagree with them. Crowds of anti-Ennahda demonstrators protested late Thursday and into early Friday in Tunis, the capital, and other cities, and the police used tear gas to disperse some of the gatherings.

Mr. Ben Jeddou told reporters at a news conference that the gunman in both assassinations was Boubakr Hakim, a jihadist and weapons smuggler who was born in France and had already been implicated in Mr. Belaid’s death. The interior minister based the assertion partly on ballistics tests on the bullets recovered from the bodies of Mr. Brahmi and Mr. Chokri Belaid, other opposition figure shot five months ago, showing that they originated from one weapon.

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