Tunisian police have arrested a group of Islamist militants who accidentally exploded a bomb they were manufacturing as part of a planned attack on the country’s commercial city of Sfax, the government said yesterday.

The interior ministry said police had arrested eight suspected members of the militant group Ansar al-Sharia late on Saturday as part of a raid in Sfax, a Mediterranean port city around 270 kilometres southeast of the capital Tunis.

Two of those arrested were wounded in the bomb blast while handling the explosive, the ministry said in a statement.

Ansar al Sharia, listed as a foreign terrorist organisation by the US, was one of the most hardline movements calling for an Islamic state to emerge since Tunisia’s 2011 uprising ousted autocrat Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali.

With an economy heavily reliant on foreign tourism, Tunisia has been cracking down on Islamist militants that it views as a key challenge on its path to full democracy.

They accidentally exploded a bomb they were manufacturing

One of the Arab world’s most secular states, Tunisia has adopted a new Constitution and a caretaker government has taken over as a way to ease tensions between a leading Islamist party and secular opponents until elections due later this year.

Three years after its uprising that inspired the Arab Spring revolutions, Tunisia is on its way to political stability with a new constitution and the promise of elections later this year.

At the same time, the country’s caretaker government, led by Prime Minister Mehdi Jomaa, is conscious that some real social challenges lie ahead.

Jomaa, a former aerospace executive who worked in France, warned Tunisians last month that they must make “painful sacrifices” to revive the economy.

Tunisia’s budget deficit is set to grow to eight per cent of GDP this year, due to public workers’ wage costs and subsidies hanging over from autocrat Zine Ben Ali, ousted in 2011.