Police in Tunisia have seized guns and explosives and arrested two men from the Salafist stronghold of Jendouba, a security source said on Saturday.

The men were detained in the Fernana area near the Algerian border after a check on the rented car they were driving, Shems FM radio reported, citing the security source. Another two men escaped.

Hundreds of Tunisians, most of them Islamists, rallied on Saturday in the capital to demand that cronies of ousted dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali be put in the dock on corruption charges.

"The people want to clean up the country," demonstrators chanted in central Tunis, with some holding Salafist flags. "People, rise up against the cronies of the dictator," they said amid a heavy police presence.

Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki has denounced arms trafficking in North Africa since the fall of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, a particular source of concern given the current strife in Mali.

The Gadhafi "regime accumulated weapons, and now some are in the hands not only of Islamists from Libya, but also from Algeria and Tunisia," Marzouki said in an interview with The World Today, edited by London-based think tank Chatham House.

Tunisia's main labor union on Wednesday called for a nationwide general strike next week, as tensions rose in the run-up to the second anniversary of the country's revolution.

"The UGTT (General Union of Tunisian Workers) has decided that a general strike will take place on Thursday, December 13, across Tunisia," it told Agence France Presse.

Supporters of Tunisia's ruling Islamist party on Tuesday attacked a demonstration by the country's main labor union, in the latest unrest two years after the revolution, Agence France Presse reported.

Several dozen assailants attacked members of the General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT) who were gathered outside the union's headquarters in Tunis to mark the 60th anniversary of the assassination of its founder, Farhat Hached.

A Tunisian suspected of involvement in an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi in which the U.S. ambassador to Libya was killed is refusing to be interrogated by FBI agents, his lawyer told Agence France Presse.

"They wanted to interrogate him as a witness, but he has refused," Abdelbasset Ben Mbarek said late on Monday, referring to his client Ali Hamzi, and denouncing what he called "interference" in the Tunisian judicial system.

The public prosecution in Tunisia has appealed against last week's court ruling to drop a case of possible indecency against a young woman allegedly raped by two policemen, her lawyer said on Monday.

"We just found out this morning that the prosecution has lodged an appeal," Bochra Belhaj Hmida told Agence France Presse. "It's their right, legally, there's nothing that can be said about that. But on the moral front..."

A Tunisian trade union on Sunday called an end to a general strike that triggered five days of violence fueled by disappointment nearly two years after the country's revolution.

"We decided to suspend the general strike," Ahmed Chefai of the UGTT union's executive board for the town of Siliana told a crowd of around 100 people.

Fresh clashes erupted on Saturday in the flashpoint Tunisian town of Siliana, amid rising discontent over poor living conditions two years after the revolution, but a deal was struck aimed at satisfying protesters' demands.

In Siliana, where intense clashes have left more than 300 people wounded this week, around 100 stone-throwing youths attacked police, injuring one of them in the head, an AFP journalist reported. The police fired tear gas in response.

President Moncef Marzouki said on Friday that the government of Islamist and rival Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali is not meeting the expectations of the people, as clashes between police and protesters in a flashpoint town intensified.

"The expectations of the people are huge and the performance of the government is not meeting those expectations," Marzouki said in a televised speech, stressing that Tunisia was at a crossroads between "the road to ruin and the road to recovery."