logo
Family's Mexico ‘dream holiday' turns into terror as gunfight erupts at poolside

Family's Mexico ‘dream holiday' turns into terror as gunfight erupts at poolside

Daily Record3 days ago
Colin Nulty, from Bolton, was enjoying a family break with his wife and 14-year-old daughter at the Riu Palace Costa Mujeres in April when gunmen burst into the hotel's pool area.
A firefighter has told how his family were forced to flee for their lives after a gun battle erupted just metres away from their sun loungers during an £8,000 dream holiday in Mexico.

Colin Nulty, his wife, and their 14-year-old daughter had been looking forward to relaxing by the pool with cocktails at the Riu Palace Costa Mujeres. Instead, they found themselves hiding under a lounger as shots rang out.

'We were sunbathing by the side of the pool and positioned right next to the Tequila Bar, near to where they serve the drinks, as that was our usual spot,' Colin told The Mirror.

'Our daughter had just left us to go upstairs. My wife and I decided to go for a cigarette at our usual spot down the ramp to the beach. Gunfire erupted and my wife and I instinctively ran back to our sun lounger and hid behind while crouching on the floor.
"My wife was crying, and people were running everywhere trying to hide behind something. I messaged my daughter whilst hiding, telling her to stay in the room, stay quiet, and lock the door as there is a shooting going on.'
Colin, from Bolton, waited for a pause in the gunfire before rushing to see if anyone needed help.

'I have advanced trauma care skills,' he explained. 'I assessed the scene and told my wife I was going to see who had been shot and if I could help them. No shots had been heard for a while, so I deemed this a suitable risk if it saved a life.
'I approached the bar, scanning for gunmen, and I could see the man on the floor was displaying what we term in the services as 'injuries incompatible with life.' He was already past help.

"It is at this moment that a man with a gun came out of the male toilet door, and he was very agitated but in control and scanning for threats. In hindsight, he seemed trained and held his weapon in a controlled manner.
"He shouted at me to go away and also shouted at a group of American teenagers who were filming the events unfolding on their mobiles.'
Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community!
Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today.
You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland.
No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team.
All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in!
If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'.
We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like.
To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'.
If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice.

Realising the danger, Colin rushed back to his wife. The family later barricaded themselves in their room, terrified.
After the ordeal, TUI offered to move them to another hotel, but en route they learned of another shootout at their proposed new resort, the Princess Hotel. They returned to their original hotel and flew home the next day.
'It was horrific and terrifying without a doubt,' Colin said. 'The fear of thinking you are in the middle of a terrorist attack of some kind is scary indeed. We were unaware until some time after the incident that it was an undercover police operation gone wrong, so, of course, we thought it was terror-related.'

The incident has had lasting effects. Colin revealed his wife has since been diagnosed with severe PTSD: 'These events had a big impact on my wife's daily life and still do to this day. It has had a massive impact on the dynamics of the home and day-to-day life of going out and walking our dogs. Everything has changed since the holiday.
"My wife has been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with Severe Emotional Dissociation. She is on the waiting list to receive treatment and counselling.'

Riu Hotels and Resorts said the shooting was part of an 'operation carried out by the Prosecutor's Office targeting a group of drug dealers in the area,' with armed individuals entering the hotel grounds.
Colin has since been refunded eight days of his trip – worth £3,873.57 – plus a £1,000 TUI voucher, but he insists it's not enough. 'We were refunded exactly eight days of the holiday, their reasoning being we had a nice time up until the shooting incident.

'Initially, TUI was responsive to emails and I had many phone conversations with a handler. However, I have never received anything in writing from them acknowledging the incident, or anything saying they are refunding or compensating.
'They have since refused to answer any of my correspondence or comment on this case with any other companies or media offices that have contacted them.'
Frustrated, Colin has turned to ABTA, the Association of British Travel Agents, and plans to take the case to small claims court. 'I only ever asked for a full refund of the holiday, but TUI's refusal has left me no choice other than to go through ABTA and then small claims court. They have made it so hard for us and they do this intentionally hoping I will just stop, but I won't.'
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

The abomination of Obama's nation
The abomination of Obama's nation

New Statesman​

time2 hours ago

  • New Statesman​

The abomination of Obama's nation

Photo by Paul Morigi/WireImage So incoherent is Donald Trump's reign, so criminal, stupid and impulsive that, incredibly, it seems that even the vaguest possibility the president could be a paedophile is the only thing which can unify the nation. To distract from the rising water, Trump has resorted to a time-honoured American tactic: turning attention towards the trusty bogeyman of the black male. Earlier this week, his administration released thousands of irrelevant documents on Martin Luther King Jr, none of them salacious or damning in any way, or even historically significant. Just days before, Trump had reposted an AI video of Barack Obama being pushed to the floor and arrested in the Oval Office, and then pacing and sitting in a prison cell wearing an orange jumpsuit. This was apparently part of a strategy: the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, alleges a 'treasonous conspiracy in 2016' in which Obama supposedly tried to sabotage Trump's election campaign, and that Obama's administration attempted a 'coup' by manufacturing intelligence showing Russian election interference. The man who loves to scream about 'fakes' and 'hoaxes' is now, not surprisingly, orchestrating phoney accusations into his own outlandish fraud. Trump has been waiting all the time he has been president to lunge at Obama. Even before landing in the White House, Trump falsely accused Obama for years of not being born in the US, and thus ineligible to be president, all the while sneeringly implying Obama's disloyalty to country by referring to him as Barack Hussein Obama. In some eerie way, Trump smells a fearful symmetry between him and his obsession. Obama remains the one political opponent Trump truly fears, an alpha political animal burning bright in the forests of the American night every bit as much as the self-anointed king from Queens. The gamble of Obama's original campaign was to make what could have been his greatest liability – his race – into a political asset. In a country anguished by war, and frightened by George W Bush's absent response to Hurricane Katrina, people were surprised to hear that the US's profoundest problem was not war or the moral efficacy of its leaders, but America's racial divisions. Americans listened to Obama thunder about the 'creed… whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: yes, we can'. Obama made sure to insert references to 'immigrants' and 'pioneers' in his stirring addresses to the nation, but the theme he constantly returned to was the country's primal wound of race and the urgent necessity of healing it. Having made race a national emergency, Obama, a black male, was positioning himself as the only figure who could come to the country's rescue. Obama dared America to perceive his very self as the representation of the violence that haunted white America's imagination. But as Obama materialised the threat, as it were, he conjured it away. The fact was, as his team made sure every American knew, he was only half-black. He was distant from his Kenyan father; he had been raised by his white mother. He had been safely processed through Columbia and Harvard. He was gracious, civil and polite to a fault. White liberals announced they were shedding tears of happiness at Obama's election. But black people – while they too celebrated – held their breath for him to come through on the promises he had made. He never did. Swept into power during the Great Recession with a mandate Trump has never had, Obama found himself in a space no American president had inhabited since FDR. Black leaders implored him to implement a programme that would create jobs on a huge scale; he also could have poured money into housing and education for black people. Go big, they beseeched him, you will never have another opportunity like this one. Instead the Harvard-conditioned Obama turned to his director of the National Economic Council, the Harvard icon Larry Summers, and went small. He broke his promises to black people, and to the disenfranchised. He bent his knee to the white status quo he had promised to restructure radically. And yet Obama remains the 12th-most popular president in American history. The political effects of his presidency might have been disappointing, but the experience of having a man so warm with humanity, so cultivated, intelligent and playfully ironic was transporting. If anyone knew the US's curse, and its blessing, it was a black man who, despite his biracial nature, had come through the American reality. A majority of Americans during Obama's eight years in office felt they were in the hands of someone to whom they could, in that fantastical mental place every politician yearns to create, pour their hearts out to. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe But this must be placed alongside the toxic racism Obama's self-promoting tactic of racialism provoked, and which led directly to Maga. The two strains have coupled and produced the rough beast of an entirely new American reality. The feeling, cultivated by Obama himself, that American salvation was embodied in the experience of black Americans has now been fulfilled, darkly and ironically, by Trump, who is rapidly making more and more Americans feel like disempowered, insignificant outsiders. The conflict between the two epochs each man represents is a battle for which group has suffered the truest affliction. In the eyes of Maga, they are the real wretched of this Earth. The demonisation of American immigrants is, for them, the restoration of a new underclass that will repair their self-esteem. The threat to annul America's only black president – Trump's AI video of Obama is no less than that – is the coup de grace. So where is Obama now, in the midst of America's greatest crisis since the Civil War? He alone, of any American public figure, has the power to reduce Trump publicly to the fraud his preposterous bluster proves he is. Look at the photographs of Trump sitting alongside Obama in the White House just after Trump's election in 2016; it is no coincidence that the AI arrest video was generated from that moment. While Obama, with masterful charm, holds the room in his hand, Trump stares at the floor, insecure, embarrassed, enraged at his inferiority. Obama might reply that it would be unprecedented for a previous president to denounce a sitting one. But Trump is unprecedented. His public humiliation of and shocking threat to Obama in that video is unprecedented. What is bad form compared to a nightmare of chaos and autocracy? Obama himself, always alive to appearances, has merely 'addressed' the general liberal spinelessness. At an exclusive gathering of liberal luminaries last week, he chastised them for being 'cowed and intimidated and shrinking away from asserting what they believe, or least what they said they believe'. 'What's needed now is courage,' he declared. Yet as he did during his presidency, he is contented with golden phrases ringing with courage while displaying no courage at all. Instead, Obama and his successor have switched roles once again. Obama and his wife, Michelle, are set to executive-produce – it is almost too surreal to write – a comedy series about America history written by and starring that flame-throwing radical, 78-year-old Larry David, yet another of America's comedic tribunes who lucratively specialise in trivialising even America's most dangerous moment. Obama won't stand up to America's tyrant. And the answer to the question of why he won't – or cannot – could well be the answer to the question of how America came to its bizarre reckoning in the first place. [Further reading: The plot against Zohran Mamdani] Related

US Coast Guard accused of detaining fisherman in Canadian waters and tossing him in jail
US Coast Guard accused of detaining fisherman in Canadian waters and tossing him in jail

Daily Mail​

time4 hours ago

  • Daily Mail​

US Coast Guard accused of detaining fisherman in Canadian waters and tossing him in jail

A Canadian man claims he was arrested by the United States Coast Guard and turned over to Border Patrol after he was accused of fishing in American waters, which he denies. Edouard Lallemand, 60, borrowed a friend's boat on Sunday, July 20, to go fishing about nine miles north of the border separating the two countries on the northern tip of Lake Champlain. He claims that despite having fished the area for decades and being certain he had not crossed the border, the Coast Guard approached him and said he was in the United States. 'I said, 'No, I'm very sorry, I'm in Canada.' And I said, 'I'm polite enough to talk to you guys but you cannot arrest me. You can't come across the border and pick me up.' But they did,' he told CTV News. He attempted to restart his boat engine - having turned it off initially at their request - when he claims the Coast Guard started to push him into the United States until it capsized and he fell overboard. Lallemand claims the Coast Guard tried to tie their boat to his and didn't bother to try and help him. 'The third time I went down, coming out with water in my mouth, spitting it out, I said, 'Throw me a buoy!' He added that when the Coast Guard arrested him, he'd never seen somebody 'so angry.' Lallemand said that he was transferred by the Coast Guard to Border Patrol, who took his fingerprints and put him in jail with just a 'dirty' blanket. He was released about two hours after being put in jail but he said: 'I'm never going to be the same.' 'I want the people to know and to be aware: stay away from the border. Even if it's 500, 600 feet from there.' His wife, Darlene Fielding, wrote an angry post on her Facebook page in English and Quebecois French, stating: 'What happened to my husband should NEVER happen again.' Fielding - who said that she and her husband 'treat our pets' better than Lallemand was treated - called the experience 'terrifying' and told CTV her husband looked 'like a beaten man.' Lallemand had visible scrapes on his legs from the encounter. 'My husband was injured, traumatized, and stripped of his rights. We don't have the means to hire a lawyer, but we DO have the right to speak out,' she added in her Facebook post. The Coast Guard adamantly denies having approached Lallemand in Canadian waters in a statement, saying they were in American territory. 'While the Coast Guard's 29-ft response boat was alongside the vessel, the operator put the vessel in motion and ignored commands to maintain course and speed for boarding purposes,' they said. They then said that when Lallemand restarted his boat, he hit their vessel. 'The vessel then made an abrupt starboard turn and struck the port bow of the Coast Guard small-boat at coordinates 45°00.792'N, 073°10.608'W, approximately 65 yards south of the U.S./Canadian border. The collision caused the vessel to capsize, putting the operator in the water,' the statement reads. 'The actions of the operator of the Canadian vessel are currently under investigation,' they added. has reached out to U.S. Border Patrol for comment. It's yet another example of tensions between the United States and Canada, formerly close allies. The relationship has been strained in recent months by political rhetoric and cross-border air quality concerns linked to Canada's record-breaking wildfires. Earlier this month, Donald Trump threw a grenade on the tariff negotiations between the United States and Canada with a blistering letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney. The two nations had been trying to settle the tariff war that broke out when Trump returned to office and announced plans to reorganize world trade. Canadian officials had hoped a deal was close, but Trump's latest letter - which he shared to Truth Social on Thursday night - set negotiations back to square one. The letter revealed he would raise tariffs on Canadian products to 35 percent from August 1 - a 10 percent increase on the current levy. Trump said the tariff hike was in part due to the fentanyl crisis and Canada's 'failure to stop the drugs from pouring into our country '. 'I must mention that the flow of fentanyl is hardly the only challenge we have with Canada, which has many tariff, and non-tariff, policies and trade barriers,' Trump wrote in the letter. Carney, who took office this year in a liberal win partly powered by Trump's trade actions and threats to make Canada the 51st state, his back in an online posting. 'Throughout the current trade negotiations with the United States, the Canadian government has steadfastly defended our workers and businesses,' Carney wrote. 'We will continue to do so as we work towards the revised deadline of August 1. Canada has made vital progress to stop the scourge of fentanyl in North America. We are committed to continuing to work with the United States to save lives and protect communities in both our countries. That came after Trump mentioned fentanyl in his trade letter, and called out Canada for a 'failure' to control it. 'If Canada works with me to stop the flow of fentanyl, we will, perhaps, consider an adjustment to this letter,' Trump added. 'These tariffs may be modified, upward or downward, depending on our relationship with your country,' he added. The latest round of tariffs are in addition to previously imposed sectoral tariffs on steel, copper and aluminum, which came into effect for most countries on June 4 at a whopping 50 percent. The latest travel advisory follows years of quietly simmering friction that boiled over earlier this year when President Trump repeatedly mocked former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, referring to Canada as America's '51st state,' and demoting Trudeau to the title of 'governor.' The introduction of tariffs between the two countries and Trump's hardline immigration policies have also seen Canadian travel to the US plunge by up to 40 percent this spring, as stories of tourists caught in the web of US immigration enforcement made headlines across the border. In response to the spike in travel-related incidents, the Canadian government has since revised its own advisory for citizens visiting the US, bluntly stating that travelers must 'comply and be forthcoming in all interactions with border authorities' and warning that visitors 'could be detained while awaiting deportation.' Last month the US Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra attempted to tamp down concerns, calling the fears 'unfounded' and the high-profile detentions 'isolated.'

DWP issues warning about new bill support scam
DWP issues warning about new bill support scam

North Wales Live

time5 hours ago

  • North Wales Live

DWP issues warning about new bill support scam

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has issued a warning about a new scam. In an alert shared on X, the DWP's official account urged the public to "beware" of fraudulent schemes, particularly those claiming to be from the department. Discussing the scam, which seems to target individuals seeking help with their bills, the DWP confirmed that it is indeed a hoax. Genuine support for energy bills can only be accessed through the official website. The DWP warned on X: "Beware: If you get a text about an 'Energy Support Scheme' it is a scam. Find out how to report and recover from any suspicious texts, phone calls, or emails via Stop! Think Fraud." Linking to their official Stop! Think Fraud website - all about how to stay safe from scams - the experts note: "Nobody is immune from fraud. The criminals behind it target people online and in their homes, often emotionally manipulating their victims before they steal money or personal data," reports the Mirror. They continue: "But there is something we can do. By staying vigilant and always taking a moment to stop, think and check whenever we're approached, we can help to protect ourselves and each other from fraud." How can I identify a scam text message? The aim of a fraudulent message, sent through SMS, WhatsApp, or other messaging platforms, is usually to deceive you into clicking on a link. This link often directs you to a fake website that's set up to nick your personal details, money, or to plant malware on your device. Scammers tend to keep their fake texts brief and straightforward, but they employ sly tactics to make them look legitimate. They might even "spoof" the sender's number so it looks like the message has come from a reliable entity, such as your bank, and appears in the same conversation thread. However, there are a number of signs that the message might be fake, so here's how to spot a suspicious message. The experts urge people to be wary if you see: an 'irresistible' product offer or prize from a number or company you don't know an urgent alert about security, for example claiming your bank account details have been compromised a message about a product or service you haven't purchased or requested a delivery company demanding you pay a fee before they deliver a parcel an appeal from a family member asking you to send money encouragement to click on an unknown link – if you're not sure, visit the organisation's website directly rather than clicking through a request for you to share personal data language designed to create a sense of urgency or panic messages sent outside normal business hours, especially if they're very late at night or very early in the morning What do I do if I get a scam text? break the contact – don't reply, click on any links, or make any payments check if it's genuine: contact the person or company directly, using a phone number you already have and know is correct forward the message for free to 7726 What to I do if I've replied to the scam text? The experts stress: "Don't panic! What you do next depends on whether you've replied, clicked a link, sent information or made a payment." You can look at their advice on what to do if you've been a victim of fraud.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store