TUNIS — Tunisia’s public prosecutor appealed a seven-year jail term on Monday, April 7, for two policemen jailed for rape, and demanded a retrial with a view to seeking the death penalty.

“The prosecution relates to the characterization of the facts as sex under duress with the threat of violence, under Paragraph 227 of the Penal Code, Article 1” which provides for the death penalty, the prosecuter’s spokesman Sofiene Sliti said.

The two policemen were convicted on March 31 of raping a young woman and sentenced to seven years in prison in a case that captured international attention.

The policemen had denied the charge and accused the woman of seeking to have sex with them.

A third officer was given two years for trying to extort money from the woman’s boyfriend.

Lawyers for the victim and several human rights and women’s organizations denounced the original sentences as too lenient.

The defendants said they had found the woman and her boyfriend having sex in their car in a Tunis suburb.

According to the charges, they took the woman to a police car, where two of them took turns to rape her, while the third tried to extort money from her boyfriend at a bank cash point.

The victim published a book in France entitled “Guilty of Being Raped” about her ordeal, writing under the pseudonym Meriem Ben Mohamed.