A policeman and three alleged terrorists are killed in an attack in Tunisia

At least one policeman and three presumed terrorists were killed and another officer seriously injured in a shooting incident that took place today in the central Tunisian city of Sousse, a tourist destination and scene in 2015 of one of the Jihadist attacks in which 38 people, mostly tourists, died.

The event, which National Guard spokesman Husam Jebabli described as a "terrorist attack", took place in a roundabout in the Port el Kantau area and the three attackers were killed after a chase that ended near the Al Kouda.

Officer Sami Mrabet died from the gunshot wounds received in the shooting, which also injured another policeman, Rami Limam, whose health condition is "extremely critical", according to the head of the emergency service of Sahloul hospital, Riadh Boukef.

Port el Kantau, some 160 kilometres from Tunis, is the site of the hotel where the attack that killed 38 tourists, mostly British, was carried out in 2015.

Armed attacks against the Tunisian National Guard have multiplied over the past two years, particularly in the Kasserine area on the border with Algeria, a mountainous area where armed groups from Tunisia and other areas of the Sahel have established themselves following the Arab springs.

Terrorist actions have also increased in the country's capital over the past year, most recently on 2 March when two presumed suicides on a small motorbike detonated a device outside the US embassy. Two months earlier, a young woman with a device in her bag committed suicide in front of a couple of police officers on Habib Bourguiba Street, Tunisia's main thoroughfare.

In 2015, three Jihadist attacks in the capital and in Sousse took the lives of 72 people, 60 of them foreign tourists, and 12 members of the presidential guard. The attacks destroyed tourism, one of the pillars of the Tunisian economy, to which it contributed 14 percent of GDP, and from which the country has still not been able to recover.