Tunisia police kill 6 ‘militants’ ahead of key polls

TUNIS (AFP) — Tunisian police killed six suspected militants, five of them women, in a raid on a suburban house Friday after a 28-hour standoff, fanning tensions ahead of a landmark election.

Two children were hospitalised after security forces stormed the home near Tunis, a day after a policeman was killed in a firefight with the suspects, interior ministry spokesman Mohamed Ali Aroui said.

He said their father, whose earlier arrest led police to the house, was a member of Ansar Al Sharia, a jihadist group branded a terrorist group by Washington.

The North African nation is preparing to deploy tens of thousands of soldiers and police for its first parliamentary polls Sunday since an uprising three years ago that inspired the Arab Spring revolutions.

The authorities have expressed fears that “terrorists” will seek to disrupt the election.

Authorities had appealed for the children and women to be allowed to leave the house in Oued Ellil, giving the gunmen an ultimatum to surrender.

“Special forces approached the kitchen where the terrorists were hiding,” Aroui told reporters at the scene.

“The women came out of the kitchen firing,” he added, describing both the men and women at the house as “terrorists”.

He said one of the children, a three-year-old girl, had suffered a head injury but was in stable condition after the raid launched on the last day of campaigning for the parliamentary polls.

In addition to the six dead, two suspected militants were hospitalised.

The suspects had been preparing attacks in the southern towns of Kebili and Tozeur, the interior ministry spokesman said.

Aroui said they had also previously tried to recruit Tunisians in the northern town of Nabeul to join anti-regime fighters in Syria, travelling via neighbouring Libya.

The women killed in the raid had planned to travel to Syria themselves.

Between 2,000 and 3,000 Tunisians are reported to have gone to join the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group and other extremist organisations fighting in Syria and Iraq.

Tunisian authorities fear some will return to destabilise the country.

The house was surrounded based on information extracted from two other suspected militants — including the father of the injured children — arrested earlier Thursday in Kebili for killing a private security guard.

Islamist resurgence 

Islamists suppressed under former strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali have proliferated since his overthrow in 2011.

Militants have been blamed for a wave of attacks, including last year’s assassination of two leftist politicians whose murders plunged the country into a protracted political crisis.

Militants claiming allegiance to Al Qaeda’s north African affiliate have been active in Tunisia since the 2011 revolution.

Jihadists have killed dozens of soldiers and police over the past three years, especially in remote mountain areas on the Algerian border.

Tunisia announced a three-day closure from Friday of the border with politically unstable Libya for fear of possible election day attacks.

Tunisians overseas began voting on Friday.

Last Monday, Interior Minister Lotfi Ben Jeddou said the authorities had foiled plots to bomb factories and attack foreign missions.

Rached Ghannouchi, leader of Tunisia’s moderate Islamist movement Ennahda, has said the country’s transition to democracy serves as an example of how to defeat extremists such as IS.

“The success of the Tunisian experience is in the international interest, especially in the fight against extremism and the fight against Islamic State and similar groups,” he told AFP in an interview.

Sunday’s election pits Ennahda against an array of secular groups, including Nidaa Tounes, whose leader Beji Caid Essebsi has criticised Ennahda as anti-democratic.

The vote will be followed by a presidential election on November 23.