Authorities have arrested 12 suspected members of the ISIL terrorist group and seized bomb making materials since a suicide attack last month, the Tunisian interior ministry said Friday.

Authorities have also “dismantled four takfiri sleeper cells in several parts of Tunisia”, the ministry said in a statement.

The announcement follows an attack by 30-year-old female suicide bomber Mna Guebla on October 29 that wounded 26 people on the capital’s busy upmarket Avenue Habib Gourguiba, in the first militant attack in the capital since November 2015.

The attack went unclaimed but the Tunisian authorities said the suicide bomber had sworn allegiance to ISIL.

Police have arrested 12 people suspected of supporting ISIL, an interior ministry spokesman told AFP, without specifying where and when the arrests were made, nor the suspects’ links to the perpetrator of October’s attack in Tunis.

The suicide bomber had contact with ISIL officials “inside and outside the country, and liaised with them over the internet”, the ministry said in its statement.

Source: AFP