Tunisia museum attack leaves 19 dead
CAIRO — Gunmen in military uniforms attacked a museum in downtown Tunis around noon on Wednesday, killing 19 people, officials said. Security forces later advanced into the museum and killed two gunmen in a firefight, state television reported.
Prime Minister Habib Essid said at a news conference that the dead included 17 tourists and two Tunisians. Eight people were killed as they got off a bus to visit the museum, according to an Interior Ministry spokesman; 10 more were taken hostage and then killed. State television reported that a Tunisian museum guard who was injured in the attack and died later of his wounds.
The prime minister said that 22 more people were injured in the attack.
Local media reports said that it was possible a third gunman was involved and was still at large, and that there were possibly other accomplices as well. Tunisian authorities said at midafternoon that the operation to retake the museum was continuing and was nearly complete.
The attack began at a time when hundreds of visitors were on their way into the museum. Interior ministry officials said the gunmen were armed with grenades and assault rifles. Gunfire was first heard around 12:30 p.m.
Helicopters buzzed over the area in the afternoon, and Tunisian state television said they were evacuating people from the area, possibly including those injured in the attack.
The site of the attack, the National Bardo Museum, is in central Tunis near the national parliament, which was evacuated as police officers responded to the attack and surrounded the area.
The identity and motivation of the attackers were not immediately clear.
Officials said it was possible that the parliament, rather than the museum, was the original intended target of the attack; some reports said that legislators were discussing an anti-terrorism law Wednesday.
Tunisia was the country where the Arab Spring revolts against autocratic rule began four years ago. Of all the countries affected, Tunisia has made the most successful transition toward democracy, recently completing presidential and parliamentary elections and a peaceful rotation of political power. Security forces have struggled against occasional attacks by Islamic extremists, but they have usually occurred in mountainous areas far from the capital.
Recruiters for the Islamic State militant group have sought to take advantage of the new level of freedom after the revolution, as well as the economic disruptions, high youth unemployment and resentment of the country’s often abusive police force, which is left over from the old authoritarian order. Those factors have helped make Tunisia one of the biggest sources of foreign fighters joining the Islamic State’s fight in Syria and Iraq.
In a video that circulated online last December, three Tunisian fighters with the Islamic State are heard warning that Tunisians would not live securely “as long as Tunisia is not governed by Islam.” One of the fighters who appeared in the video was Boubakr Hakim, a suspect wanted in connection with the 2013 assassination of a left-leaning Tunisian politician, Chokri Belaid.
As the assault on the museum unfolded Wednesday, supporters of the Islamic State circulated the video again on social media, celebrating the attack as a fulfillment of that warning.