Two Tunisian soldiers were wounded Monday when a device exploded in the Mount Chaambi border region during the ongoing hunt for a group of jihadists who have mined the area, a medic said.

"Two soldiers were wounded, one of whom lost his leg and the other was hurt in one eye," said a doctor at the hospital in Kasserine, the regional capital just a few kilometers from the theater of operations.

Politicians have reached an agreement on a future political system in Tunisia, ending a months-old stalemate that had blocked progress on drafting the new constitution, the head of the ruling Islamist party said on Friday.

"We have overcome the impasse, we are heading towards a mixed regime where neither the head of state nor the head of the government will have supreme control over the executive power," Rached Ghannouchi told Tunisian radio.

The Tunisian university dean accused of slapping a veiled female student said he was acquitted on Thursday, in a case that has come to symbolize bristling tensions between Islamists and secularists.

Habib Kazdaghli said "Tunisian justice acquitted me," adding that his accuser and another female student on trial for having sacked his office at Manouba University outside Tunis had been given a suspended two-month sentence.

Tunisian security forces were on Thursday hunting two armed jihadist groups near the Algerian border, one in the Mount Chaambi region and the other in Kef further north, the interior ministry said.

"There are two groups, one of about 15 to 20 people in Mount Chaambi... Another group is in the Kef region near the Algerian border," ministry spokesman Mohamed Ali Aroui told Agence France Presse.

Tunisian troops clashed on Wednesday with around 50 armed jihadists in the remote Mount Chaambi border region, a security source said, the first such operation since the revolution in January 2011.

"The group consists of more than 50 Salafi jihadists," the source told Agence France Presse, adding that they were well armed and some were veteran Islamist militants who had come from northern Mali.

Land mines wounded six soldiers and police in western Tunisia on Tuesday as security forces continued a search for "terrorists" that has already caused casualties, the interior ministry said.

Two men were seriously wounded by Tuesday's explosions, the ministry said without elaborating, a day after a soldier and a member of the national guard each lost a leg in similar blasts and another was seriously hurt in the eyes.

Tunisia's ousted president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on Tuesday was handed a third life sentence since he fled to Saudi Arabia in January 2011 during a mass uprising against his rule.

The military court in Sfax, southeast Tunisia, convicted Ben Ali over the violent repression of protests in the region during the revolution in which one person died and two others were injured, the official TAP news agency reported.

A land mine explosion seriously wounded two members of Tunisia's national guard on Monday as they pursued a group of armed Islamists near the Algerian border, the interior minister said.

The men were "seriously wounded by the explosion of a mine while they were conducting a search operation at Mount Chaambi targeting terrorist elements on the run," the ministry said, referring to Islamist militants.

A young jobless man set himself ablaze and was seriously wounded on Sunday in front of the town hall of Sidi Bouzid, birthplace of Tunisia's 2011 revolution, witnesses said.

Brahim Slimani, 23, doused himself with petrol and set himself alight in front of the closed town hall, to the alarm of passers-by who rushed to his rescue.

A young Tunisian man given seven years in jail for posting cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed on the Internet has petitioned President Moncef Marzouki for a pardon, his lawyer and relatives said Saturday.

Jabbeur Mejri "prefers to stop court proceedings against him, and hopes instead to be granted a presidential pardon," defense lawyer Ahmed Mselmi told Agence France Presse.