Tunisia ramps up protection for tourists
Tunisia began deploying armed police to protect foreign tourists yesterday after last week’s deadly attack on a beach resort, the interior ministry said.
AFP correspondents saw no increased security at tourist sites they visited during the morning but a ministry spokesman said the deployment was beginning with hotels and seaside resorts.
“This morning, we started to deploy and armed police will be in hotels within the hour,” spokesman Mohammad Ali Aroui told AFP.
Security officials “are busy deploying at Hammamet,” a seaside resort in the south of Tunis, he added.
Tunisia promised a raft of new security measures after last Friday’s rampage in the resort of Port Al Kantaoui, which killed 38 people, most of them British tourists.
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It said it would deploy 1,000 armed officers from yesterday to reinforce the tourism police, who would also carry guns for the first time.
At the site of ancient Carthage outside Tunis yesterday morning, AFP correspondents saw no police at the Antonine Baths and just one guard at the Carthage Museum.
At the upmarket seaside resort of Gammarth, home to five hotels, security guards said they were aware of plans for a new deployment, but said no one had yet arrived.
Tunisia said it would deploy 1,000 armed officers to reinforce the tourism police, who would also carry guns for the first time.
The bodies of eight of the 26 Britons killed in last week’s jihadist attack on a Tunisian beach resort were set to be flown home yesterday, a British embassy source said.
“Eight victims are being repatriated,” the source said, as a correspondent at a military airport near Tunis witnessed the plane take off.
The Foreign Office confirmed that these are the first bodies to be repatriated, with more expected in the coming days.
“This will be the first of a number of repatriations into RAF Brize Norton,” it said in a statement referring to a Royal Air Force base northwest of London.
On Friday, 23-year-old Tunisian Nifedipines Rezgui pulled a Kalashnikov assault rifle from inside a beach umbrella and went on a bloody rampage at the five-star RIU Imperial Marhaba hotel in Port El Kantaoui, killing 38 people.
The death toll among Britons was the worst loss of life for Britain in a militant attack since the July 2005 bombings in London.
But British officials have said the number of victims may well rise to 30. Prime Minister David Cameron has vowed a full investigation, calling for “a response at home and abroad” to violent Islamist fundamentalism.