Horror stories arrive with Britain’s dead
LONDON— A couple on vacation to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary. She’s in a medically induced coma, he died on the spot.
A retired power-station worker sunbathing alongside his wife. She lived, he didn’t.
A grandmother of four killed on the 10th anniversary of her spouse’s death. Another couple, basking in the sunshine on the day hubby turned 66. A man and woman who’d just bought their first house together. A 19-year-old student, slaughtered alongside his uncle and granddad. A retired nurse who played dead to fool the gunman, even as he shot her husband. A 24-year-old photographer who survived the initial onslaught on the beach but was slain when the attacker threw a grenade into her hotel lobby.
A woman, shot through the chin — bullet exiting through her eye — who clung to her bullet-riddled spouse’s body even as paramedics tried pulling her away for emergency medical treatment, and later, unable to speak after surgery because of the tracheotomy tube, scrawled a written message to nurses: She wanted her husband’s wedding ring.
The after-stories of last Friday’s massacre on the beach at a Tunisian resort are only now beginning to surface. The victims have started to arrive, medevac-ed out of terror’s front line aboard military aircraft like war-wounded troops and fatalities from Afghanistan, from Iraq.
That slaughter on the sunbeds of Sousse unfolded — it was at least 20 minutes before any security forces responded, according to newly obtained footage — amongst a large contingent of British holidaymakers. That’s why it feels so close to home for the U.K., with at least 19 Britons among the murdered, bleeding out amidst the frothy drink concoctions and the seaside masseurs and the cabana boys.
Some of those boys, including 18-year-old paragliding instructor Ibrahim al-Ghoul, helped form a human shield to block the gunman from entering a building with tourists inside.
“At that point we opened our breasts against bullets,” al-Ghoul told reporters afterwards. “I felt he wouldn’t shoot at so many Arab people in front of him.”
As indeed the rampaging gunman, Seifeddine Rezgui, 23, did not, yelling at the Arab locals as he jogged down a side street, spraying carnage from the end of a machine-gun: “I haven’t come for you! Go away!”
Some 20,000 Britons were on vacation in Tunisia last week and at least half of them have bolted.
The death toll had reached 38 as of Wednesday. It’s feared Britons will account for up to 30 of them when the dust clears, making last week’s ambush the largest loss of British life since 7/7, the co-ordinated 2005 suicide bombings that targeted public transport in central London, killing 52 (plus the four bombers) and injuring upwards of 700. The 10th anniversary of that dreadful morning is mere days away.
So yes, London feels twitchy — more so because of a preplanned massive emergency and counter-exercise rehearsal, which saw 1,000 full-geared officers fanning out over the capital over the past two days. It’s a simulated terrorist strike. In the real world, details are emerging of who Rezgui was and how he got that way — a path beaten to the door of lone-wolf extremism (although some witnesses to the Sousse violence still insist there was a second gunman) that detoured once more, at least by association, through England, through London — or Londistan, as it’s sometimes sarcastically called.
The shooter had allegedly been inspired by Seifallah Ben Hassine, founding leader of Ansar al-Sharia, the main terrorist group in Tunisia. Hassine arrived in Britain in the late 1990s and became a follower of notorious hate-preacher Abu Qatada, then also based in London.
According to court papers first obtained by the Daily Mail, Hassine used London as his base for founding and running the “Tunisian Fighting Group” from 2000 onwards. The terror network had links to Al Qaeda.
It’s believed Hassine spent three years in London and by 2011, when he left, he’d established Ansar al-Sharia, the group that Rezgui’s family claim indoctrinated him while the young man was studying for a master’s degree in Kairouan, 50 km from Sousse. The group, seen as the Tunisian wing of the Islamic State, was purportedly behind a similar attack at another Sousse resort two years ago.
Authorities in Tunisia also claim that Rezgui — killed by a couple of harbour guards — had visited neighbouring Libya for terrorism training. Libya, where the Royal Air Force (and Canadian fighter pilots, among others) conducted 28,000 bombing sorties in aid of revolutionaries who ultimately overthrew Moammar Gadhafi.
Then Libya plunged into jihadist chaos. You’re welcome. But pity most of all — beyond the murdered and maimed — Tunisia itself, cradle of the Arab Spring uprising, where it all began and the only place where revolution kept faith with a citizenry yearning for democracy.
British tourists have flocked to its beautiful beaches.
Now they come home in caskets.