More than 200 wounded in Tunisia clashes with police

SILIANA, Tunisia (AFP) - (AFP) - More than 200 people were wounded on Wednesday in a second day of clashes between Tunisian security forces and thousands of protesters in a poor southwestern town, a hospital source told AFP. An emergency medic at the hospital in Siliana said 206 people had been treated for bruises, fractures and cuts, some of them having been hit by buckshot. Nineteen people were hit in the eye, and some of them transferred to a clinic in Tunis for treatment. Several thousand protesters had turned out for a second day to call for the resignation of Ahmed Ezzine Mahjoubi, the governor of Siliana, a poor farming region 120 kilometres (75 miles) south of Tunis. They were also demanding funds to boost economic development and the release of 14 people detained in unrest in April last year. It was the same sort of economic grievance that fuelled the Arab Spring uprising that toppled veteran strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali early last year. A correspondent for the TV news channel France 24, David Thomson, and his Tunisian colleague were hit by police fire, he told AFP. They were rushed to hospital, but their lives was not in danger. Tensions were stoked by rumours that some of the protesters had been killed, but hospital and police sources denied any deaths. The emergency services in Siliana were visibly overwhelmed, as relatives of the victims gathered and vented their anger, an AFP correspondent reported. "We will burn the town!" shouted a man whose son was among those injured. The interior ministry refused to comment on the unrest, despite repeated requests by AFP, or to supply figures for the number of people injured. Several armoured vehicles belonging to the national guard deployed in the town, while protesters barricaded the streets, some of them with burning tyres, as they had on Tuesday. By early evening, sporadic clashes were taking place between the police and stone-throwing demonstrators, while thick clouds of tear gas were visible throughout the day. But the police later withdrew from the town, according to the official TAP news agency, citing the interior ministry. "The security forces have completely withdrawn from the town," the report said, and an AFP journalist confirmed that the police were no longer visible on the streets of Siliana, after hours of clashes. The protesters had gathered at 0900 GMT in front of the prefecture in Siliana for a second day of strikes and protests over poor living conditions. "The people of Siliana most affected by poverty will never go down on their knees," said Nejib Sebti, secretary general of Tunisia's largest trade union, the UGTT, warning that the protesters were "ready to die for their rights." The police used rubber bullets to scatter the protesters on Tuesday. Some 200 people demonstrated in the capital on Wednesday in support of Siliana's residents. Investment in the Siliana region fell by 44.5 percent from January to October, compared with the same period last year. Much of Tunisia's interior suffers from a chronic lack of development, and has seen growing social unrest in the face of rising discontent over the Islamist-led government's failure to improve living standards. The governor of Sidi Bouzid, the town in central Tunisia where the uprising began that toppled Ben Ali, was sacked in October, after weeks of similar strikes and protests. Precarious living conditions and widespread unemployment were driving factors behind Ben Ali's overthrow in the first of the Arab Spring uprisings that have since swept the region.