An attack in Tunisia kills a policeman and three assailants

Forensic police officers work at the place in the municipality of Susa where two policemen were stabbed this Sunday by three terrorists BECHIR TAIEB / AFP

Tunisian police killed three suspected terrorists on Sunday after they stabbed two National Guard officers in the tourist district of Port el Kantaui, in the coastal city of Susa.

One of the policemen died and another is seriously injured in events that have not yet been claimed by any organization.

This town was the same where in June 2015 a terrorist belonging to the Islamic State took the lives of 38 tourists, most of them British, who were staying in a Spanish hotel.

That attack caused an exodus of tourists from which it was already recovering when the country began to suffer the effects of the pandemic this year.

The three assailants ran over at 6.42 this Sunday the two agents, located in a roundabout.

They got out of the vehicle and stabbed them, Hatem Zarguni, the security officer in Susa, reported to local media.

Then their service weapons were taken from them and they fled.

The two officers were taken to the hospital.

Police officer Sami Mrabet died and his partner, Radi Liman, is seriously injured.

Meanwhile, several witnesses provided information about the attackers' vehicle, which were killed minutes later in a nearby town.

Two of them have been identified as two brothers of 20 and 25 years who worked in an aluminum carpentry.

Tunisia is the only dictatorship that was transformed into a democracy after the Arab Spring of 2011. The country is in a delicate situation from an economic point of view and not very stable on a political level.

Elies Fajfaj, the prime minister elected in February to lead a fragile coalition government, resigned in July after serving only five months in office, after being accused of corruption.

The Tunisian Parliament approved on August 30 the formation of another coalition government, the ninth since the Arab Spring, whose prime minister is the technocrat Hichem Mechichi, head of the Interior in the last Cabinet.

Among the three serious problems of the country is corruption, the economy and the scourge of terrorism.

In June 2019, two consecutive attacks in the country's capital caused nine injuries.

In 2018, a suicide bomber set off an explosive device and managed to injure 15 people before dying in the center of the capital.

In July of that year, six agents of the Tunisian National Guard died in the Aïn Soltan region, located in the north-west of the country, in an area on the border with Algeria.

Perhaps the most popular attack was the one that took place in the Bardo museum, where two people died, including two Spaniards.

This latest attack coincided with the visit to the country of the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González, who began a tour in Tunisia on Saturday that will then continue in Libya.

The minister paid tribute at the Bardo National Museum to the victims of the March 2015 attack.