Woman killed in Tunisia police hunt for Salafist arms

Tunisian police raided a working class suburb of the capital in a hunt for suspected Salafist arms caches on Sunday, sparking a firefight in which a woman was killed, the interior ministry said.

Police came under Kalashnikov fire in the Douar Hicher neighborhood, northwest of Tunis, and fired back, seriously wounding the gunman and killing his wife, ministry spokesman Khaled Tarrouche told AFP.

Douar Hicher is a district considered a bastion of radical Islamists.

Members of Tunisia’s militant Salafist movement, thought to number between 3,000 and 10,000, have been implicated in numerous acts of violence since last year's revolution.

On September 14, hundreds of radical Islamists angered by a U.S.-made film mocking their religion attacked the US embassy in Tunis and a neighboring American school in a day of violence that left four people dead and dozens wounded.

Two Islamists arrested in connection with the embassy attack and who were on hunger strike died last month.