TUNIS: Security forces and hardline Islamists fought street battles in Tunis on Sunday, with one protester killed and 11 policemen wounded, after the authorities banned the Salafists from staging their annual congress.
The confrontations infuriated moderate Islamist Prime Minister Ali Larayedh, who for the first time linked the Salafist Ansar al-Sharia group which is considered close to Al-Qaeda to “terrorism”.
“Ansar al-Sharia is an illegal organisation which defies and provokes state authority,” Larayedh told Tunisian state television during a visit to Qatar.
“It has ties to and is involved in terrorism,” he said.
Sunday’s fighting erupted when Ansar al-Sharia (Partisans of Islamic Law) urged its followers to mass in the capital’s suburb of Ettadhamen in defiance of a ban on their gathering in the central city of Kairouan.
Salafists advocate an ultra-conservative brand of Sunni Islam, and Ansar al-Sharia, whose fugitive leader fought with Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, does not recognise the authority of the Tunisian state.
Suppressed under president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, radical Islamists have grown increasingly assertive since the popular uprising that ousted the secular strongman in January 2011.
Islamists have been blamed for a wave of violence that has rocked the North African country, including an attack on the US embassy last September that left four assailants dead and bombings targeting shrines venerated by Sufis who follow a mystical form of Islam.
Hundreds of Salafists erected barricades in the streets of Ettadhamen, a poor neighbourhood 15 kilometres (9 miles) west of Tunis, and hurled rocks at police who responded with tear gas, an AFP journalist reported.
The security forces used armoured cars and bulldozers to destroy the barricades and gain access to Ettadhamen, a stronghold of the Salafist group.
Police closed in on the Islamists, forcing them to retreat to the neighbouring district of Intilaka where sporadic clashes continued into the early evening.
A hospital official said one protester died of gunshot wounds. The interior ministry confirmed one death, but did not say how he was killed.
Mounira Ben Ghazi, a senior supervisor at Mongi Slim hospital, named the dead man as Moez Dahmani, in comments made to Express-FM radio station.
Earlier the interior ministry said 11 policemen and three Salafists were wounded, some seriously.
Police detained several Salafists including Ansar al-Sharia spokesman Seifeddine Rais, a police source and the movement said.
Rais said last week that the group did not need “permission from the government to preach the word of God” and warned that the authorities would be held responsible for any bloodshed.
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