Algeria arrests opposition figure Fethi Ghares

Algerian authorities on Tuesday arrested opposition figure Fethi Ghares before taking him to an unknown place, his wife and the Algerian CNLD prisoners' rights group said.

Fethi Ghares, former coordinator of the now-banished leftist Democratic and Social Movement party, was arrested by plainclothes police at his home in the capital Algiers, said his wife, Messaouda Cheballah.

In a video posted on Facebook and titled "Where's Fethi Ghares?", Cheballah, who is also a political activist, said police asked her husband to follow them for what they said was "an interrogation" and had no summons order.

She also said the police officers told her they would take him to a nearby police station, but when she went there, other officers told her he was not brought there.

There has been no official statement on Ghares's arrest.

The arrest came ahead of Algeria's presidential elections on September 7.

Ghares, 49, has previously been arrested in 2021 and was later sentenced to prison on charges including insulting the president.

In January 2022, he was sentenced to two years behind bars for "harming the person of the president of the republic", Abdelmadjid Tebboune, and "spreading information that could harm national unity" and public order.

He was released in March 2022 after his sentence was reduced on appeal.

A figure from Algeria's secular leftist opposition, Ghares in 2019 joined the pro-democracy Hirak movement -- mass protests that swept veteran president Abdelaziz Bouteflika from power.

His Democratic and Social Movement party -- successor of the Algerian Communist Party -- was banished in February 2023.