Tunisia’s Interior Ministry says the North African country has sacked 110 members of its security forces over suspected affiliation to extremist groups.

The ministry’s spokesman said those discharged from their posts belong to “different corps – police, national guard, the army, customs.”

Their dismissal “is linked... to very serious suspicions of membership in terrorist organizations or sympathy towards them,” Louguini said.

He added that the measure was taken following detailed investigations launched at the beginning of the year.

A nation reacting to terror

On July 24, the Tunisian parliament approved a new anti-terror law in a bid to counter a growing wave of terrorism in the country. The law authorizes the death penalty for several terrorism-related offenses in a country that has not carried out an execution since 1991. It also permits the detention of terrorism suspects for 15 days without having access to lawyers.

The law was approved nearly a month after a gunman killed 38 people near the northern Mediterranean coastal city of Sousse on June 26.

Also in March, 22 people, mainly foreigners, were killed after militants attacked Bardo Museum in the capital, Tunis.

Both attacks were claimed by Daesh, which has taken control of swathes of land in the Middle Eastern countries of Iraq and Syria. The Takfiri group has also carried a number of terror attacks in other parts of the world in recent months.