Chokri Belaid

Chokri Belad , also transliterated as Shokri Belad, was a Tunisian lawyer and politician who was an opposition leader with the leftsecular Democratic Patriots Movement. Belad was a vocal critic of the Ben Ali regime prior to the 2011 Tunisian revolution and of the current Islamistled Tunisian government. OnFebruary 2013, he was fatally shot outside his house in El Menzah, close to the Tunisian capital, Tunis. As a result of his assassination, Tunisian Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali announced his plan to dissolve the existing national government and to form a temporary national unity government.

Belad was born in the town of Djebel Jelloud in Tunisia onNovember 1964. He was a student activist in the 1980s. He worked as a lawyer and was also part of the defence team of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein during his trial for crimes against humanity. He spoke out against a 2008 clampdown on miners, and was a noted political critic of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the strongman Tunisian leader in office foryears, whose 2011 selfexile to Saudi Arabia was the first tangible result of the Arab Spring uprisings. Belaid was also a poet, and one of his poems is dedicated to Lebanese intellectual Hussein Muruwa, who was assassinated by Islamists in the late 1990s.

Source: Wikipedia