Gunman was right next to us . . . we saw people dying
TWO terrified British women were yards from the attacker when he pulled a gun from behind an umbrella and started to shoot.
Ellie Makin, 22, of Ripon, North Yorkshire, and her friend Debbie Horsfall, from Huddersfield, were relaxing on the beach when the Tunisian horror began.
Speaking from her barricaded hotel room last night, Miss Makin said: ‘ We were on the beach and there was a man on our right with an umbrella.
‘He dropped the umbrella and pulled a gun, he started shooting everyone on the right. He was just shooting people and they dropped to the floor. I saw people dying around me.
‘Everyone started screaming to run, so we just turned and ran.’
The pair sprinted to the hotel to hide from the attacker, but were told by staff the sounds were just a lawnmower.
Miss Makin, a tennis coach, said: ‘I said “No it’s not, that’s gunfire!” No one knew what they were doing.’
Before long the gunman burst into the hotel and started to shoot. Miss Makin ran upstairs and hid in a stranger’s room. Last night said she ‘ had never feared for her life as much as today’.
Holed up with Miss Horsfall last night, she said there was not enough security surrounding the hotel.
She said: ‘And now there’s no police, no one protecting us. They say they’ve got the place on lockdown, that’s bull****.
‘They told us to get into our rooms, but we’ve got another room as there was shooting in the one next to it.
‘We don’t want to stay in here. We just want to get home now, right now. I want to go home. No one is telling us anything, people are saying there’s still attackers on the run but we don’t know.
‘I couldn’t get through to the Foreign Office for an hour and a half and they just told me to wait for a call.
‘Another man staying here went to check out outside and said he saw no police, no cordon, anything.’
Miss Makin posted a picture of her Facebook update on Twitter last night. It said: ‘The most terrifying day of my life in Tunisia.
‘I have never feared for my life as much as today. Get me back home. Scared isn’t even the word.’
Ellie’s father, Michael, contacted the Daily Mail to say there was ‘barely any security’ in the Imperial Marhaba hotel where his daughter is staying.
Mr Makin said: ‘My daughter was the first person to see the gunmen. She saw the man next to her get shot dead.
‘She ran back to the hotel and shouted the man had a gun. She is OK, but she said there is barely any security at the hotel. It’s really worrying.’
When Miss Horsfall took refuge in the hotel she heard a woman say her husband had been shot. ‘All we could think of was we’re next,’ she said.
Stacey Webb, 23, from Barry, South Wales, said she locked herself in a hotel bathroom with seven others following the shooting. I have never been more scared in my life but I hope God is with me,’ she said.
Kelsie Collins, 24, of Pontypridd, who is staying at the Sahara Beach Resort near the seafront, said her family had been told to stay in their room.
She said: ‘There’s mostly Brits here in the hotel but nobody is really saying anything to each other, everyone’s confused and in shock.’
‘We just want to go home’