Tunisia has announced it is closing its land border with war-torn Libya for 15 days after a deadly bus bombing killed at least 13 people on a presidential guard bus in Tunis The National Security Council, headed by President Beji Caid Essebsi, decided to close the frontier from midnight on Wednesday with “reinforced surveillance of maritime borders and in airports”, a statement said.
The bus was hit on the busy Mohamed 5 Boulevard on Tuesday evening, prompting Essebsi to impose a nationwide state of emergency. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement shared on its supporters’ social media accounts on Wednesday.
In addition to temporarily closing its Libya border crossing, Tunisia will hire 6,000 more recruits for security forces and act to protect itself against Tunisians returning from conflict zones like Syria, the president’s office said. Tuesday’s incident was the third major attack in Tunisia this year following the gun assaults on a Sousse resort hotel in June and the Bardo National Museum in Tunis in March.
