TUNIS — On a gray December morning, Noureddine Bhiri and his wife Saida slid into the family car outside their home in Tunis’ El Manar neighborhood. With Saida at the wheel, the middle-aged couple was about to set off for work when four blue Ford SUVs screeched around them, blocking their path. “A group of bearded youths in civilian clothes snatched the car keys out of my wife’s hands and forced us to get out,” Bhiri recalled. The men were armed. “They shoved me into the back of one of the jeeps. I thought to myself, ‘They are Islamic State.’ I was terrified,” Bhiri said.

Bhiri, 64, a senior figure in the Islam-oriented Ennahda party, was held incommunicado for three days in a heavily guarded shack in a forest outside Tunis where the howls of wolves and grunts of wild boar filled the air. “Who are you? Why have you kidnapped me?” he asked his captors repeatedly. He was offered no answer. It wasn’t until he was moved to a state hospital after refusing food and drink that Bhiri, a diabetic, discovered he was under “house arrest” because he posed “a threat to Tunisia’s national security.” His ordeal lasted 64 days.

Last week, Ennahda’s 81-year old leader, Rached Ghannouchi, was grilled by counterterrorism police, spending 30 hours in different security units over three days. Ali Laarayedh, a former prime minister and a fellow Nahdaoui, as party members are known, was held for interrogation as well. All three leaders are among some 800 individuals being investigated for supposedly encouraging thousands of Tunisians to take up arms with assorted jihadis in so-called “hotbeds of tension” in Libya and Syria during Ennahda’s first two years at the helm of Tunisia’s first freely elected government that was formed in 2011.

Lawyer Abderrazak Kilani, who is defending Ennahda, labeled the investigation a “disgrace.” “There is nothing in the prosecution's case to prove these absurd claims. The dossier is empty,” Kilani told Al-Monitor. Ghannouchi is due to undergo further questioning on Nov. 28.