TUNIS: Tunisian security forces arrested two militants on the border with Algeria in a car full of maps, military costumes and materials for making explosives, the official news agency said yesterday.
Two others in the vehicle stopped in the town of Fernana on Friday night managed to flee, TAP news agency said.
The country, whose economy has been hit by euro zone woes, has been tense for two weeks as police fought with protesters seeking jobs and development in the town of Siliana.
Government supporters clashed with unionists in Tunis last week. Western countries, worried about the spread of Al-Qaeda in north African and Sahel states, are backing the government, in which the Ennahda party rules with two center-left partners.
Separately, Hundreds of Tunisians, most of them government supporters, rallied yesterday in the capital to demand that cronies of ousted dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali be put in the dock on corruption charges.
“The people want to clean up the country,” demonstrators chanted in central Tunis. “People, rise up against the cronies of the dictator,” they said amid a heavy police presence.
The rally was organized by the League for the Protection of the Revolution, a group close to the ruling Islamist Ennahda party, which claims its mission is to protect the goals of the 2011 revolution that toppled Ben Ali.
Tunisia arrests militants in car with explosives
