TUNIS: A Tunisian policeman was killed in a fire fight near the capital yesterday amid fears of jihadist violence in the run-up to the first parliamentary election since the country’s 2011 revolution.
“Our agent died of a bullet wound in the eye sustained in clashes with a terrorist group,” a police official said at the scene.
The interior ministry said police traded gunfire with armed “terrorists” who had taken refuge in a house in the town of Oued Ellil on the outskirts of the capital.
The police source said the family of a gunman holed up in the house was also inside. Amid sporadic rounds of gunfire, a large deployment of police besieging the house used loud hailers to urge the suspects to surrender.
With security beefed up ahead of Tunisia’s parliamentary election on Sunday, interior ministry spokesman Ali Aroui told Mosaique FM radio that police had also clashed earlier Thursday with two “terrorists” in Kebili, 500km south of Tunis.
The suspects were arrested after killing a private security guard in the gunfight, he said.
They had been “preparing operations in the area,” Aroui said, adding that two Kalashnikov assault rifles were seized.
Elsewhere, two soldiers were lightly wounded in a roadside bomb blast in Sakiet Sidi Yussef near the Algerian border, defence ministry spokesman Belhassen Oueslati said.
AFP
