Tunisia's government will decide by Saturday whether to allow or ban Salafists from holding their annual congress, the interior minister has said, while warning that "death threats" from radical Islamists will not be tolerated. "The final decision will be taken today or tomorrow," Lotfi Ben Jeddou told Kalima radio on Friday. "The government will not be swayed by death threats."

Jihadists being pursued by the army on Tunisia's border with Algeria are veterans of the Islamist rebellion in Mali, where France led an intervention to oust them in January, Interior Minister Lotfi Ben Jeddou said Wednesday. "They came from Mali," the minister said during an open session in the national assembly, without giving more details on the militants. "I would have liked this to be a closed session to be able to say more," he told MPs, who were grilling him about the hunt for the two fugitive Islamist groups.

Two jihadist groups the Tunisian army is pursuing on the border with Algeria belong to Al-Qaeda, interior ministry spokesman Mohamed Ali Aroui said on Tuesday. "There are two groups, one in the Kef region with around 15 people and the other in Mount Chaambi with around 20 people," Aroui told a news conference, referring to the Islamist groups the army has been hunting since last week. "There is a connection between the two groups, and the one in the Chaambi region has ties with the Okba Ibn Nafaa brigade, which is linked to Al-Qaeda."

Tunisian troops clashed on Wednesday with around 50 armed jihadists in the remote Mount Chaambi border region, a security source said, the first such operation since the revolution in January 2011. "The group consists of more than 50 Salafi jihadists," the source told AFP, adding that they were well armed and some were veteran Islamist militants who had come from northern Mali. An AFP journalist nearby reported hearing an exchange of gunfire in the area, close to Tunisia's border with Algeria, which was surrounded by soldiers and patrolled by helicopters.