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Sousse, Tunisia:
Attackers with knives killed a Tunisian National Guard officer and wounded one other Sunday earlier than three assailants have been later shot useless in a firefight, the army drive mentioned, labelling it a “terrorist” act.
The stabbing assault came about within the vacationer district of Sousse, the coastal metropolis hit by the worst of Tunisia’s jihadist assaults of latest years, when 38 individuals, most of them Britons, have been killed in a 2015 beachside capturing rampage.
A patrol of two National Guard officers was focused within the knife assault in Sousse, 140 kilometres (80 miles) south of the capital Tunis, mentioned National Guard spokesman Houcem Eddine Jebabli.
“One died as a martyr and the other was wounded and is hospitalised,” he mentioned, including that “this was a terrorist attack”.
The attackers had first rammed the gendarmes with a car at about 6:40 am (0540 GMT).
After the knife assault, safety forces pursued the assailants, who had taken the officers’ weapons and car, by the Akouda district of town’s vacationer space of El-Kantaoui, mentioned Jebabli.
“In a firefight three terrorists were killed,” he mentioned, including that safety forces “managed to recover” the automobile and two pistols the assailants had stolen.
President Kais Saied, on a go to hours later to the sealed-off scene of the knife assault, mentioned police have been investigating whether or not the assault was deliberate “by individuals or an organisation”.
British ambassador to Tunisia Louise de Sousa tweeted she was “appalled to hear of the attack on a National Guard patrol in #Sousse this morning.
“My honest condolences to the household of the murdered officer & I want a swift restoration to the injured. #UKsupportTunisia”
– Series of assaults –
Tunisia, since its 2011 well-liked revolution, has been hit by a string of jihadist assaults which have killed dozens of safety personnel, civilians and overseas vacationers.
A suicide assault in opposition to safety forces defending the US Embassy in Tunis killed a Tunisian police officer and left a number of others wounded in March.
2015 was a very bloody 12 months, with three main lethal assaults claimed by the Islamic State group.
An assault on the capital’s Bardo museum in March killed 21 overseas vacationers and a safety guard.
Just three months later, the 38 vacationers have been killed within the capturing rampage at Sousse.
And in November of that 12 months, a bomb blast on a bus in central Tunis killed 12 presidential guards.
While the scenario has considerably improved since then, Tunisia has maintained a state of emergency.
Assaults on safety forces have continued, primarily in distant areas alongside the border with Algeria.
Tunisia has been praised as a uncommon success story among the many 2011 Arab Spring revolts that swept the area and introduced down many autocrats, amongst them Tunisia’s long-time president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
But the small Mediterranean nation of about 11 million individuals is mired in an financial disaster, with the official unemployment price at 18 p.c, and in want of recent help from the International Monetary Fund.
Last week Tunisia’s parliament authorized a brand new technocratic authorities led by Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi, which faces the duty of tackling deep social and financial woes within the North African nation.
The 46-year-old premier pledged to revitalise the financial system, together with the essential tourism sector, which had rebounded after the jihadist assaults however has been hit laborious this 12 months by the coronavirus pandemic.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV workers and is printed from a syndicated feed.)
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