TAP said former Ben Ali allies Abdallah Kallel and Abdelaziz Ben Dhia have been placed under house arrest, and police are looking for a third man, Abdelwaheb Abdallah.
Kallel, the Senate president and a former government minister, was stopped from leaving the country after Ben Ali fled. A Geneva-based legal advocacy group, Trial, said torture was widespread in Tunisia while Kallel was interior minister in the early 1990s.
Ben Dhia is considered one of Ben Ali's most influential advisers, and Abdallah was a top political adviser to the former president.
Explaining the detention of the owner of a private TV station and his son for "grand treason", a government statement said: "The owner of Hannibal TV (Larbi Nasra), who is a relative of the former president's wife, is using the channel to abort the youth's revolution, spread confusion, incite strife and broadcast false information. The aim is to create a constitutional vacuum, ruin stability and take the country into a vortex of violence that will bring back the dictatorship of the former president."
Saleh Attia, a columnist from the daily Assabah newspaper, said however that the move was a sign the daily protests had begun to unnerve the authorities, which were divided over how to proceed.
Hundreds of protesters rallied in the capital to press on with their demands that holdovers of Ben Ali's 23-year regime be kept out of power. "We have gotten rid of the head of the snake but the tail is still alive — and we need to completely kill it," said protester Nizar Bouazziz, a 24-year-old student who said he walked to the rally from Sidi Bouzid.
