In a statement posted on the Internet on Wednesday, the group says a militant it identified as Abu Abdullah al-Tunisi carried out the attack after infiltrating the bus and killing around 20 “apostates”.
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“I am not scared – we are courageous people – but people are sad”, she said.
The bus was hit on the busy Mohamed 5 Boulevard on Tuesday evening, prompting President Beji Caid Essebsi to impose a nationwide state of emergency.
No group claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s attack.
“For years this place has been our gathering point but they didn’t think to change it, although we are the first to be targeted”, another one said.
Yesterday, a bus carrying a few members of the Presidential Guard was attacked by a bomb which resulted in 12 recorded deaths and many more injuries.
Ministry spokesman Walid Louguini told The Associated Press on Wednesday that the 13th body couldn’t be identified by fingerprints because no fingers were found. The ministry said a DNA analysis of the body is underway. “Victory will be on the side of Tunisia”, he said, according to Aljazeera.
The interior ministry said 10 kilos of Semtex explosives were used in the bombing. Tunisia has been attacked twice before by jihadis in the previous year. The beach massacre and an earlier deadly assault at the Bardo Museum in Tunis were both claimed by Islamic State and have undermined efforts to revive an economy where high unemployment has been partly blamed for stoking unrest.
The transport ministry announced following the blast that security would be reinforced in the country’s ports and only passengers would be allowed to enter Tunis’s global airport.
A suicide bomber “wearing a coat and earphones” is suspected of blowing himself up near the door of the bus, Reuters reported, quoting a presidential official named Mahdy Al-Maghraby’s statement to Shems FM radio. Some have threatened to return to stage attacks in Tunisia.
The attack came two weeks before a group of Tunisians heads to Oslo to receive this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, awarded to the country’s National Dialogue Quartet for negotiations that rescued the country’s fledgling democracy from a constitutional crisis.
According to recent reports, it seems like the country will proceed to close its borders with Libya for a total of 15 days, and hire over 6,000 more recruits for the security forces, to protect Tunisians throughout the country from any further possible attacks.
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Tunisians are also fighting alongside extremists in neighbouring Libya.
