PM Says Assad Not Welcome in Tunisia

Tunisia's Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali said on Tuesday that Syria's Bashar al-Assad would not be welcome in his country, after the Tunisian president offered the Syrian leader asylum in Tunis.

"I respect our head of state but I do not want to see Assad in our country. And if I were to encounter him, I would put him in front of a court and hand him over to the Syrian people," Jebali told the website of German news weekly Der Spiegel.

Tunisia's President Moncef Marzouki has said the north African country would be prepared to grant Assad refuge if it helped bring peace to Syria after nearly a year of violence.

"If we want to stop the killing, the only way is to have a solution like the Yemeni solution: that the president leaves power and that he has safe haven, somewhere to go," Marzouki told BBC World News last week.

Jebali, who was due to visit German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday, also said in his interview that outside military intervention would be "pure madness."

"It would pour more oil onto the fire and give Assad the excuse, which he is urgently seeking, to deploy his military even more forcefully," he said, in remarks published in German.

Nevertheless, he stressed: "We cannot and will not accept that a regime is systematically murdering its people ... whoever continues to deliver weapons to the Assad regime is helping the killing of the Syrian people."