Tunisia to build border barrier with Libya to keep out militants

CAIRO // Tunisia is building a wall along its border with Libya to prevent the infiltration of extremists following a beach front attack that killed 38 tourists.

The wall, which will cover about a third of the 500-kilometre border, will be ready by the end of the year, prime minister Habib Essid said in a television interview on Tuesday.

The government has already started construction, said Mr Essid, although he warned that protecting the border would be “difficult, very difficult”.

While Tunisia has escaped the worst of the unrest that swept through Libya, Syria and Egypt since 2011, the violence is hurting an economy struggling to recover after the uprising that toppled president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

The barrier is one of the measures Tunisia has announced to counter the threat of militancy that has targeted the tourism sector, which accounts for about 7 per cent of the country’s economy.

A month-long state of emergency was declared on Saturday, days after the July 26 attack on a hotel in Sousse that killed 38 tourists. It came three months after an attack on a museum near Tunis that killed 22.

On Wednesday, Mr Essid justified the state of emergency and implied that personal freedoms guaranteed by the constitution should not be affected by the “exceptional measures”.

He said that authorities believe plots aimed at massive deaths and destruction of the country’s economy are in the works.

The ISIL branch in Libya claimed responsibility for both attacks.

* Bloomberg and Associated Press