Seifallah Ben Hassine Fighting Group. He fled Tunisia following a crackdown by the regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali against the student movements in 1987. He was sentenced in absentia by the Tunis military court to two years in prison for his participation in the events. He first moved to Morocco where he studied in the Faculty of Legal Sciences at the Mohammed I University. It was at this time he married. He later went to the United Kingdom in the 1990s and studied under the al-Qaeda cleric Abu Qatada. He then fought alongside Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and in 2000
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali candidates were required to get endorsements from 30 political figures. Given the RCD's near-absolute dominance of the political scene, prospective opposition candidates discovered they couldn't get their nomination papers signed. The subsequent years saw the return of several Bourguiba-era restrictions. For many years, the press had been expected to practice self-censorship, but this increasingly gave way to official censorship. Amendments to the press code allowed the Interior Ministry to review all newspaper and magazine articles before publication. In 1992, the president's older brother Habib Ben Ali was tried in absentia in France for laundering the proceeds of drug trafficking, in