Tunisia synagogue toll rises to 7

TUNIS, Tunisia -- Tunisia is seeking to deflect suspicions that a blast that killed at least seven people outside North Africa's oldest synagogue site was a suicide attack.

The country's eight daily newspapers all repeated the government explanation that the blast was an accident when a tanker carrying cooking gas blew up.

But Israeli officials said they believed the explosion was a terrorist assault.

A Tunisian tour guide died overnight of injuries sustained in the blast, a tourism official said, taking the confirmed death toll to seven.

Four German tourists, a policeman and the driver of the tanker died when the truck blew up outside the El Ghriba Jewish shrine on Thursday on the resort island of Djerba, according to Tunisian authorities.

In Berlin, a spokeswoman for the German foreign ministry said an 11-year-old boy died of his injuries early on Friday and said two German women were confirmed dead and a third missing.

She said 24 Germans were being treated in hospital, several of them with serious injuries. Some of the injured may be flown back to Germany for treatment, she said.

Tunisian authorities issued a list of 32 injured, one of them a Frenchman who was "very seriously" injured.

A spokesman for the German travel firm TUI told Reuters a coach carrying about 45 tourists was near the synagogue at the time of the explosion and was hit by the wave of the blast.

High stakes for Tunisia

The Tunisian government said it was a tragic accident, but Israel suspected foul play and witnesses told Reuters that the chain of events appeared suspicious.

A statement from the German foreign ministry however, referred to the blast as an accident.

Diplomats told Reuters that the stakes were high for Tunisia, which portrays itself as a haven of peace between the turmoil in the Middle East and a decade of violence in neighbouring Algeria.

Thousands of Jews, including Israelis, gather each spring at the shrine in a rare festival that Tunisians proudly point to as a sign of religious tolerance.

The synagogue itself is only about 75 years old, but there has been one on the site for what some estimate to be 1,900 years.

Djerba hosts over a third of the five million tourists a year who visit the country, Africa's top destination after South Africa. Nearly a million of last year's visitors to Tunisia were German.

The Tunisian government, which tightly controls the media, was quick to stress the blast was an accident.

"Preliminary indications show that a truck equipped with a gas tank hit the pavement and outer fence of El Ghriba shrine," a senior government official said.

He said the police and judiciary were carrying out separate investigations and that all information would be made public.

After Israel's foreign ministry said it believed the deadly explosion was a terrorist attack an independent local group, the Committee for Liberty and Human Rights Respect in Tunisia (CRLDHT), also cast doubt on the official explanation.

"The government version is questionable particularly if we take into account that the synagogue was in a dead-end road," it said in a statement.

Witnesses said the truck had taken an unusual route.

"The driver took a bizarre non-tarred track which cuts through olive trees and the truck blew up about three metres from the synagogue outer wall," said one of several reporters allowed inside the compound 11 hours later.

"People who witnessed the incident said the driver outfoxed police guarding the synagogue, as few people knew about or usually took that track."

Gerard Ben Rabi, the leading figure in the local Jewish community, told Reuters by telephone that the synagogue main room took the brunt of the blast and was severely damaged.

He expressed doubts that the blast was deliberate.

"Tunisian Arabs and Jews here could not believe that an attack could target El Ghriba, a landmark of tolerance between religions and culture," he said.