Tunisian officials today said they considered as "suspect" the driver of the fuel tanker that exploded outside a synagogue last week, in the first sign that Tunis believed the deadly blast may have been an attack.
An official statement said the investigation into the explosion, which killed 15 people including 10 German tourists, was continuing "in the context of acts directed against sites of Jewish worship in certain European countries," citing France and Ukraine.
A synagogue in the Ukrainian capital Kiev was attacked Saturday by around 50 youths who beat up several Jews including a rabbi, while France has seen a string of attacks on Jewish buildings, in the worst of which a Marseille synagogue was destroyed.
Attacks on synagogues around the world have been in apparent retaliation for the Israeli military offensive against Palestinians in the West Bank.
Tunis had previously rejected assertions, first by Israel and then by Germany, that the blast outside the Ghriba synagogue on Tunisia's Djerba island may have been an attack.
The driver, whose badly charred body was found at the site of the blast, had been in contact with people in Germany, the statement said. The German weekly news magazine Stern said in its edition due out on Thursday that German investigators had traced a call between Djerba and Germany shortly before the explosion last Thursday.
A Tunisian official said earlier the driver had been identified as a man who lived with his family in Lyon, France. "Judicial and security authorities are continuing their investigation in coordination with the foreign parties concerned, that is the Germans and the French," the official said, without citing the driver's nationality.
The magazine said the call appeared to have been made by the driver or someone else in the fuel truck and reported that German authorities believed the caller was linked to Osama bin Laden's extremist al-Qaeda network. The London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Qods Al-Arabi reported on Tuesday that Al-Qaeda had claimed responsibility for the blast.
The Tunisian official questioned the credibility of the Al-Qods Al-Arabi report, saying it emerged late and its source could not be verified. "The investigation will nevertheless continue in every possible direction," he said.
More than a dozen suspects have been arrested over the attack in Kiev, which the synagogue's chief rabbi Moshe Asman described as "quite simply a pogrom".