Tunisia arrests ‘first’ regional Al-Qaeda suspects

Tunisia said yesterday it has arrested an Algerian and a Libyan in possession of explosives in the country’s first arrests of suspected members of Al-Qaeda’s north African offshoot.

The two men were detained in Nekrif, a town in the southern Tataouine region 130 kilometres from the Libyan border, officials said.

The Tunisian military has reinforced its presence in the area amid battles just across the border between Libyan rebels and government forces.

It was the “first arrest” in Tunisia of presumed members of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), an official said.

The two “were arrested on Saturday at around three in the morning in possession of an explosive belt and a homemade bomb,” the official said. The arrests were “during a patrol of security forces but the Libyan refused to comply and he was injured” and hospitalised, he said.

Tunisian Interior Minister Habib Essid later confirmed the arrest of “two dangerous people” and identified the Algerian as Abou Muslum, 31, and the Libyan as 32-year-old Abou Batine.

Another interior ministry source said that weapons and ammunition were found after the arrest in a cave in Beni Khedache in the country’s southern Medenine region.

An official described the discovery of suspected AQIM militants in Tunisia as a “dangerous” development, the TAP news agency reported.

One of the suspects tried to set off a bomb before the arrests but it did not explode, the official news agency said.

The source cited by TAP said the arrival of two suspected foreign “terrorists” in Tunisia was worrying given the “current difficult conditions” in the country.

Tunisia remains unsettled following a wave of­ popular protests that began in December and led to the ouster on January 14 of former president Zine el Abidine Ben Ali after 23 years in power.