Tunisia has arrested 12 ISIS suspects and dismantled four takfiri cells in the country since a suicide attack last month, said the interior ministry on Friday.
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 ISIS.
Authorities also seized bomb making materials in their raids in the country.
An interior ministry spokesman did not specify to AFP 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 ISIS officials "inside and outside the country, and liaised with them over the internet", the ministry said in its statement.
The ISIS officials had taught the bomber how to make explosive devices, and she built the one used in the attack, the statement said.
A laboratory producing explosives and electronic components has also been uncovered in a Tunis suburb, the ministry said.
The four dismantled cells are suspected of having been in contact "with terrorist officials entrenched in the Tunisian mountains to organize a series of attacks... aimed at sensitive targets with weapons, a car, poison or remote explosives", the statement said.
Investigators confiscated "a very large quantity of explosive and chemical products, along with a drone equipped for remote bombings", the statement added, without specifying where the haul was found.
In a separate statement late on Thursday, the interior ministry said a police patrol had been targeted by an armed group in the middle of Kasserine, a marginalized city in western Tunisia.
A passerby was shot and wounded, the ministry said.
The attack was claimed by ISIS in a statement on its Telegram account, saying its fighters had opened fire on the patrol.
