Bureaucracy, a lack of competition and a banking system in ruins have ossified the Tunisian economic model, the World Bank said Wednesday, calling for sweeping reforms.

Poverty and soaring unemployment were behind the 2011 uprising when Tunisians overthrew longtime dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

The prosecution service said Monday it has opened an inquiry after a frontrunner in Tunisia's presidential poll in November,  87-year-old Beji Caid Essebsi, said members of his own party want him killed.

Prosecution service spokesman Allala Rhouma told Agence France-Presse that after statements Essebsi made during a meeting on Friday, an inquiry has begun "and the judge will summon Mr. Essebsi so he can name those implicated."

Deposed Tunisian despot Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's last foreign minister, Kamel Morjane, said Saturday he will stand in the November presidential election, the first since the 2011 revolution.

"The party's national council met yesterday (Friday) and, after examining the situation in the country, insisted that I stand in the election. I accepted," Morjane, who heads al-Moubadara (the Initiative) party, told Jawhara FM radio station.

For the first time there are more women than men in Tunisia, a country of nearly 11 million, preliminary census results released on Friday showed.

"The population of Tunisia is 10,982,754" as against 9.9 million in 2004, National Statistics Institute chief Hedi Saidi told a news conference.

Tunisian police and Islamists protesting against the arrest of a militant have clashed in the southern town of Douz, the interior ministry said on Friday.

Belgium was wrong to extradite a former Tunisian professional footballer turned convicted al-Qaida fighter to the United States and must pay him compensation, Europe's top rights court ruled Thursday.

Nizar Trabelsi, who was arrested just two days after the September 11 attacks in 2001, was sentenced to 10 years in jail in 2003 for plotting a suicide truck bombing against a Belgian air base where American troops are stationed.

Tunisia has stabilized from the fallout of the 2011 revolution and is now ripe for investment in its battered economy, Prime Minister Mehdi Jomaa told AFP in an interview.

Speaking ahead of the "Invest in Tunisia: Start-up democracy" conference to be held on Monday, Jomaa said Tunisia's new government was upbeat but realistic about a recovery.

A major power outage hit the Tunisian capital briefly on Sunday and cut off electricity across the country after a technical breakdown, local media and residents said.

Electricity was cut for almost two hours in the capital, and power was being restored in stages around Tunisia, local residents said.

Tunisian coastguards on Sunday resumed the search for more bodies of drowned migrants, thought to be mainly Syrians, after finding a 42nd shipwreck victim, officials said.

"Forty-two bodies have been recovered: 31 were buried on the spot and 11 others will be during the day," said Tahar Souid, coordinator of the emergency center set up at Ben Guerdane in southeast Tunisia where the first bodies were discovered on Friday.

Germany said Tuesday that one of its nationals had died in a tense region of Tunisia, after Tunisian officials said police had killed two women at the weekend, mistaking them for members of an armed group.

"The foreign ministry must unfortunately confirm that a German national was fatally injured in Kasserine in Tunisia," a ministry spokeswoman told AFP.