Interior Ministry announces arrests after video of assault on sub Saharan woman sparks outrage

The Interior Ministry announced on Friday evening that security units had arrested several people who appeared in a video showing the sexual assault of a sub Saharan African woman, after the footage spread widely online this week.

In a statement, the ministry said the suspects were identified and detained after an investigation was opened, despite the absence of a formal complaint in the case.

The video, which circulated on social media on Thursday, drew strong public outrage. It showed a group of men forcing their way into a home and sexually assaulting a sub Saharan African woman in front of her husband, in scenes condemned by social media users and human rights organisations.

An independent verification published this week found the footage to be authentic, while concluding that its exact date and location could not be established with certainty.

According to the ministry, preliminary investigations found the video to be old. The statement said the incident dates back five years and that the footage was circulated this week from two different continents at the same time. It said enquiries were continuing into the circumstances of the case and the reasons the video was released at this particular moment, and referred to what it called attempts to distort and instrumentalise it.

The case landed in an already charged climate. On Thursday a coalition of rights groups, parties and associations, among them the Tunisian League for Human Rights, the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights and the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women, condemned the video as a grave crime and linked it to what they described as a rise in racist, xenophobic and discriminatory rhetoric in the country.

The treatment of sub Saharan African migrants has been politically fraught since February 2023, when President Kais Saied linked migrants from south of the Sahara to criminality and to a plan to change the country's demographic make-up, remarks widely denounced as racist and followed by a surge of violence against Black African migrants. The subject returned to parliament in April, when a deputy dismissed the idea that a sub Saharan woman could be raped in Tunisia, drawing wide criticism and a later apology.

Tunisia adopted a law criminalising racial discrimination in 2018, the first of its kind in the region. Rights groups have repeatedly called for stronger enforcement, particularly in cases involving Black Tunisians and sub Saharan African migrants.

In its statement, the ministry reaffirmed the state's commitment to guaranteeing the "rights and dignity" of everyone on Tunisian territory and to applying the law against offenders. It restated what it described as Tunisia's "humanitarian approach" to migration and its aim to encourage the voluntary return of irregular migrants to their countries of origin "in the best possible conditions".

No formal complaint had been filed in the case. The investigation, the ministry says, is continuing.