Tunisia-Nabil Karoui will be handed over to Tunisia in exchange for Algerian political refugee in Tunisia Slimane Bouhafs

According to the Algerian journal “avant-garde”, Qalb Tounes leader Nabil Karoui, as well as his sibling, Ghazi, were captured in Tbessa, and will, in all probability, be handed over to Tunisia as part of a refugee exchange agreement.

According to the newspaper, Algeria has obtained the arrest and the exfiltration of the Algerian political refugee, Slimane Bouhafs, who had been living in Tunisia since 2018, and who would have been “kidnapped” by anonymous people onAugust 25, before reappearing in an Algerian police station.

The newspaper specifies that Bouhafs was, nevertheless, placed under the protection of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Tunis.

Note that Slimane Bouhafs was kidnapped from his house in Hay El Tahrir, in the Tunisian capital, by three individuals in civilian clothes who were on board a van bearing a foreign registration number (not Tunisian). Slimane Bouhafs had been living in Tunisia since August 2018, where he received political refugee status from the UNHCR office in Tunis.

In Algeria, he was arrested on July 31, 2016, and accused of “insulting Islam” and “attacking the image of the prophet”. He was convicted for “his Christian faith” to “three years in prison”. He left Algerian jail in April 2018, before taking refuge in Tunisia.