Tunisian police fire shots to disperse extremists

Tunisian police have fired warning shots to disperse radical Islamist protesters after they set a security post ablaze and ransacked an art exhibit they called offensive to Islam.

It is not clear whether there have been any injuries.

Tensions between authorities and Islamist protesters around the capital, Tunis, have mounted in recent days.

Late Sunday, hundreds of extremists destroyed artworks at an exhibit in the suburb of La Marsa that included paintings that caricatured Mecca and portrayed a nude woman. The next night, radical protesters set fire to a police post in La Marsa and to a security kiosk in Kram. Police then fired warning shots to disperse them, witnesses said.

Tunisia was where the Arab Spring pro-democracy uprisings began, when protesters overthrew a longtime dictator.