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The Mirror’s Jeremy Armstrong recalls his memories of seeing the horrific aftermath of the Tunisia hotel terror attacks that killed 38 tourists 10 years ago today
The sunbeds were still spattered with blood on Sousse beach when we arrived to witness the aftermath of the attack. There were paperbacks strewn across the sand where victims fell as a Jihadist gunman pulled out his Kalashnikov.
Extremist Seifeddine Rezgui, a 22-year-old electrical engineering student, had massacred 38 tourists 10 years ago today in an attack on a beach outside the five-star Riu Imperial Marhaba hotel complex. Sunglasses and sun cream had been left among the personal belongings dropped by tourists fleeing for their lives. Amid the carnage, there was extraordinary bravery. Eyewitnesses told how hotel staff and sunbathers formed a ‘human shield’ around Brits and foreign tourists in a desperate bid to save them.
A bar manager at the Belle Vue hotel, next door to the Imperial Marhaba, told how ordinary Tunisian people had tried to save people in the line of fire. The man, who would give his name only as Houssem, added: ”I was shouting at people ‘run, run’. The gunman was laughing as he was shooting, when he had finished and he had killed everyone, he did not care, he did not try to run.
“He threw a mobile phone into the sea, he took it apart, then he came up here step by step and he was smiling, he was happy about what he wanted to do. Everyone was scared, but we did everything we could to stop him.”
Brit John Yeoman, from Kettering, posted a photo of Belle Vue staff forming a human shield. He said: “Staff were in a line and they were shouting at him, saying ‘we won’t let you through’. They shouted: ‘You’ll have to go through us’. That’s why he’s got his back turned to them. He tried to get to my hotel and they stood up to him.”
Young and old, parents and grandparents, a beautician, a nurse, a council worker were all slain by the laughing gunman. Yet Rezgui’s family claimed he was a football-loving, typical teenager before he was radicalised on-line by IS, and groomed for murder.
His uncle revealed: “We didn’t know where he was going, and there were no goodbyes. The entire family is shocked at the hidden reality of what he was capable of.”
But the killer posted before the massacre: “If love of jihad is a crime the whole world can witness that I am a criminal.”