Cleaners identified tourists in shooting
HOLIDAY reps were only able to identify some of the 38 victims of a beach shooting in Tunisia after the cleaning ladies told them which hotel rooms had not been touched by their occupants.
A Thomsons manager said that many of the victims, who included 30 Britons, were not easily identifiable because they were wearing only their swimming costumes.
An inquest into the deaths has a statement from Camilla Bekkevold, resort team manager of parent company TUI UK, who said that in many cases they were only able to identify the victims because the cleaning ladies had told them which rooms had not been returned to since the shootings.
Ms Bekkevold said: “Most people were in swimwear and were not carrying any papers or documents. It was a particular problem if a couple had been killed or injured because there was nobody else there asking for them.
“Cleaning ladies reported to us what rooms were not touched. This is how we started to identify some of the people.”
Jim McQuire, 67, and his wife Ann, 64, from Cumbernauld, North Lanarkshire, and Billy Graham, 51, and his wife Lisa, 50, from Bankfoot, Perthshire, were among the victims in June 2015.
Venancio Lopez, managing director of Tunisie Voyages said there were concerns about the impact increased security would have on tourists before the shootings.
At a meeting with the British Embassy officials in Tunis, he said: “We wanted to increase the security in general but we didn’t want tourists to be scared by seeing an army of police.”