SIDI BOUZID, Tunisia (Reuters) –They called it the “slap heard around the Arab world”. And it never happened.
Or so said yesterday the Tunisian policewoman who was accused of hitting a young man in the face four months ago, prompting him to set himself alight and triggering a chain reaction of popular anger against Arab police states that has since unseated two dictators and caused others to tremble.
“I’m innocent. I did not slap him,” Fadia Hamdi, the 36-year-old policewoman, told a court in the provincial city of Sidi Bouzid before the judge dismissed the case and freed her.
The mother of Mohamed Bouazizi, the young vegetable seller who felt so aggrieved by Hamdi’s treatment of him that he set himself on