Judge condemns ‘cowardly’ police

THE police response to the Tunisian terror attack was shambolic and cowardly, the coroner said yesterday.

The inquest was told that officers armed with assault rifles and body armour took 30 minutes to arrive at the scene – despite being parked three minutes away.

They went via a police station on the ‘pretext that they required more weapons’.

The coroner, Judge Nicholas LoraineSmith, said the delay by the officers was deliberate and unjustifiable.

Meanwhile two marine guards arrived by boat but one of them fainted through ‘sheer terror’. The other stripped off his uniform so he would not be recognised and ‘ mingled with the crowd of onlookers’. Grieving relatives of the 30 British victims of the attack yesterday wept as the coroner concluded: ‘The response by the police was at best shambolic, at worst cowardly.’

Judge Loraine-Smith yesterday ruled that those who died were ‘unlawfully killed’ but he refused to make a formal finding of neglect against the owners of the hotel or travel operator Tui.

He said law on neglect did not, in his view, apply to tourists who voluntarily went abroad and the ‘endless what ifs’ may not have prevented the atrocity. It applied only in cases were someone had a duty of care towards someone because of their ‘youth, age, illness or incarceration’.

The coroner told the hearing: ‘The simple but tragic truth is that a gunman armed with a firearm, ammunition and grenades went to that beach and entered that hotel intent on killing as many tourists as he could.’

He criticised the response of the Tunisia authorities, saying that police had not entered the hotel grounds until the gunman had killed all 38 tourists.

The judge slammed the unit that stopped off ‘on the pretext of’ picking up more weapons instead of going straight to the scene. He said: ‘They had everything they required to confront the gunman and could have been at the scene within minutes. The delay was deliberate and unjustifiable.’

He said that when a senior officer arrived on the scene, he remained outside the complex and did not fire a single shot.

Gunman Seifeddine Rezgui, who was high on drugs, smiled as he shot 14 Britons on the beach, five more around the outdoor pool, and 11 inside the hotel during a 16minute shooting spree.

He was able to emerge from the hotel, walk up and down the beach and disappear up an alleyway before he was eventually cornered and shot 20 times.