19/01/2007
TUNIS - The Tunisian authorities denied on Wednesday charges from human rights groups that they had carried out a massive wave of arrests when recently dismantling a "terrorist" group.
"There was no campaign of arrests, nor arrests outside the framework provided by the law," one official said.
"At a time when investigations are going on into the terrorist group which was recently neutralised by the security services it is irresponsible to make unscrupulous suppositions," it said.
On January 12 Interior Minister Rafik Haj Kacem had announced the arrest of 15 people and the death of 14 others, including two members of the security services, after gun battles with suspects in late December and early January.
He said those arrested had links with a "Salafist terrorist group" comprised mainly of Tunisians, and that the ringleader, Lassad Sassi had been shot and had died of his injuries.
However the Tunisian human rights league said "several dozen" people had been arrested, including some young worshippers as they came out of mosques.
At the time of the arrests the police recovered explosives, embassy maps and lists of foreign diplomats.
The Tunisian press have said that the group was preparing attacks on the US and British embassies.
Tunisia maintains a hard line against Islamic extremists.
There had been no previous reported cases of attacks on embassies in Tunisia, with the exception of threats and hoax bomb threats received by the embassies of the United States, France and the British cultural centre.
Kacem said the origin of the trouble had come when six armed men, all Tunisian except for one Mauritanian national, crossed Tunisia's sprawling desert border with Algeria.
The clashes took place at Hamman-Lif and Soliman, south of the capital.
The Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat is an Al-Qaeda affiliate, a radical group which aims to create an Islamist state in Algeria.
The group claimed responsibility for the April 2002 truck-bomb attack on a synagogue in Djerba, which killed 21 people including 14 German tourists.
SOURCE: Middle East Online
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