Who killed Tunisia's Chokri Belaid?
Tunisian politician Chokri Belaid knew he was about to be assassinated.
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Never one to be silenced, Belaid continued to give media interviews up until the eve of his death, accusing the Islamist-led government of encouraging political violence.
"On February 1, he was at my house. He told us: 'This time, the threats are serious,'" Hedi Abdi, a close friend and member of Belaid's Democratic Patriots Party, said.
Sure enough, the secretary-general of the leftist secularist party was shot four times on his doorstep on February 6.
His funeral was one of the largest outpourings of grief in Tunisian history, with an estimated one million people taking to the street.
The assassination caused the biggest political crisis Tunisia has experienced since the 2011 uprising that brought down President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, and has cast doubt over the independence of the country's judiciary and security forces.
"We say there are people who have an intellectual, a moral and a political responsibility in the assassination of Chokri," said Nizar Snoussi, head of the Committee for the Defence of Chokri Belaid, a group of lawyers pushing for justice.
Six months after his killing, a second opposition figure was shot under similar circumstances. Mohamed Brahimi, a pan-Arab leftist, was assassinated on July 25.
Many of the suspects wanted in connection with Belaid's killing are also allegedly linked to Brahimi's assassination, according to the authorities, raising further questions why most remain free.
On Thursday afternoon, there was an assassination attempt against Mongi Rahoui of the Democratic Patriots' Party, who, as reported previously by Al Jazeera, has been facing similar death threats to those faced by Belaid and Brahimi for some time.
Ennahdha, the Islamist party that is the strongest member of the ruling coalition, has found itself increasingly isolated in the political crisis that has ensued.
Constant surveillance
The sophistication of the intimidation and surveillance of Belaid is a factor that his friends and family say suggests that those behind his murder may have had access to the state's surveillance apparatus.
Prime Minister Ali Laarayedh, the interior minister at the time of the killing, said at a press conference on February 27 that one of the suspects had confessed to having watched Belaid for about a week prior to the shooting.
Belaid's friends say the threats and surveillance had gone on for more than a year, although it intensified into constant surveillance in the last days before he was shot.
In December 2011, Belaid had begun to be followed by cars and motorbikes, and to receive threatening phone calls and text messages, Abdi said.
By late December 2012 and January 2013, Belaid's two email accounts were hacked, as was his Facebook account. (At the time of this writing, a Facebook fan page dedicated to Belaid still bears the "Hacked" profile picture, uploaded on December 31, 2012, the day when an anonymous hacker took control of the account.)
Belaid had to abandon arranging meetings by text message or phone calls, since details were clearly being shared with a third party.
"Sometimes, we succeeded in getting him away without the people realising it. But then within an hour, wherever we took him, they would be back on his trail," Abdi said. "The only way they could have known where he was, as far as we are aware, is that they were following his phone by GPS."
Only when Belaid experimented with taking the battery out of his phone were they able to shake his pursuers for a fleeting amount of time.
"It's not some isolated terrorists from Chaambi or Tora Bora, it's the state apparatus," Abdi argued, dismissing government claims that the killers are a group of Salafist-jihadists acting in isolation. "The same apparatus that existed under Ben Ali still exists, and Ennahdha is responsible for how it is being used."
Basma Khalfaoui, Belaid's widow, is one of those now experiencing the same patterns of intimidation.
The interior ministry dismissed the allegations that Belaid was being tracked and his communications spied on as unfounded.
"Those are political allegations," Lotfi Hidouri, a spokesman for the interior ministry, told Al Jazeera.
Crisis of confidence
A group of lawyers working on the case say investigators are not doing enough to study the possible complicity of leading figures from Tunisia's ruling Ennahdha party, adding they might bring it to an international tribunal.
The government has stepped up arrests of Salafists implicated in violence in recent weeks. But the move comes much too late to be taken seriously by many Tunisian opposition politicians and activists who have called for the Ennahdha-led government to clamp down on such groups since it came to power in late 2011.
"They're looking for scapegoats to close the case," Abdi said. "But there are people protecting [those who carried out the killings], there are people providing them information."