Tunisian police 'wounded in clash with Salafists'

Two Tunisian security agents were wounded in a gunfight with suspected hardline Islamists, police said on Tuesday, as special forces deployed in the far south to protect desert oil fields. "The special operation targeted three people suspected of belonging to a Salafist group," said a senior police official in the western town of Kasserine, where the clash took place. One of the suspects was seized, but his companions opened fire, wounding two security agents, and all three managed to escape in the confusion, abandoning a Kalashnikov assault rifle. One of the security agents was badly wounded in the leg. Security patrols and "sweeping" operations have been launched in the region to hunt for the suspects, the same source said. The interior ministry declined to comment. The three suspected Salafists are linked to a jihadist group the authorities pursued last month in western Tunisia, near the Algerian border, after a deadly attack there, according to a national guard source. At the time, security forces arrested 16 men suspected of belonging to a group with ties to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and recovered weapons thought to have originated from Libya. But another 18 people were still being sought. Since the 2011 mass uprising that overthrew ex-dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia has witnessed a wave of violence blamed on Salafists, including an attack on the US embassy in Tunis last September that left four people dead. Algerian officials said 11 of the 32 Islamist gunmen who overran the In Amenas gas field earlier this month seizing hundreds of hostages were Tunisian. Tunisia has in recent days deployed special forces near oil and gas sites in the far south, close to the Algerian border, as a "precautionary measure" in the wake of the deadly In Amenas attack, a security sources said on Tuesday. "These measures seek to prevent any terrorist attack targeting the (Tunisian oil and gas) fields, especially those situated along the Tunisian-Algerian border," said one source, quoted by the official TAP news agency. Another source in the southern Tataouine region told AFP on Tuesday that Kalashnikov rifles and a quantity of drugs had been seized in Remada, near the country's borders with Libya and Algeria, from a Libya-registered car. The desert shared by Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Mali has long been a haven for smugglers but the presence of jihadists has added a new dimension. President Moncef Marzouki has warned of the perils of arms trafficking throughout the north Africa region since the fall of Libya's Moamer Kadhafi.