'I saw hotel terror attack aftermath firsthand - bravery shone amid bloodshed'
The sunbeds were still spattered with blood on Sousse beach when we arrived to witness the aftermath of the attack. There were paperbacks strewn across the sand where victims fell as a Jihadist gunman pulled out his Kalashnikov.
Extremist Seifeddine Rezgui, a 22-year-old electrical engineering student, had massacred 38 tourists 10 years ago today in an attack on a beach outside the five-star Riu Imperial Marhaba hotel complex. Sunglasses and sun cream had been left among the personal belongings dropped by tourists fleeing for their lives. Amid the carnage, there was extraordinary bravery. Eyewitnesses told how hotel staff and sunbathers formed a 'human shield' around Brits and foreign tourists in a desperate bid to save them.
A bar manager at the Belle Vue hotel, next door to the Imperial Marhaba, told how ordinary Tunisian people had tried to save people in the line of fire. The man, who would give his name only as Houssem, added: 'I was shouting at people 'run, run'. The gunman was laughing as he was shooting, when he had finished and he had killed everyone, he did not care, he did not try to run.
'He threw a mobile phone into the sea, he took it apart, then he came up here step by step and he was smiling, he was happy about what he wanted to do. Everyone was scared, but we did everything we could to stop him.'
Brit John Yeoman, from Kettering, posted a photo of Belle Vue staff forming a human shield. He said: "Staff were in a line and they were shouting at him, saying 'we won't let you through'. They shouted: 'You'll have to go through us'. That's why he's got his back turned to them. He tried to get to my hotel and they stood up to him."
Young and old, parents and grandparents, a beautician, a nurse, a council worker were all slain by the laughing gunman. Yet Rezgui's family claimed he was a football-loving, typical teenager before he was radicalised on-line by IS, and groomed for murder.
His uncle revealed: "We didn't know where he was going, and there were no goodbyes. The entire family is shocked at the hidden reality of what he was capable of."
But the killer posted before the massacre: "If love of jihad is a crime the whole world can witness that I am a criminal."
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I also found – on my first trip, in the autumn of 2017, when the Foreign Office advice against visiting the country had just been lifted – a place straining under a set of debilitating after-effects. The restaurants in Sousse were all but empty in what should have been the October end-of-season rush. The vendors in the souk were desperate, starting the haggling process on any item that I examined at so meagre a figure – and so dispiritedly – that it was impossible to feel anything but pity. It is easy to absorb the horror of a terrorist attack, then swipe a black mark of damnation across the entire country (and the many people who live there) in question. Indeed, such a reaction is one of the key ambitions of such assaults. But to eliminate Tunisia from future travel plans on the basis of headlines made a decade ago is both unnecessary and unfair. There have been atrocities in several holiday hotspots since June 2015: in the Maldives, in Sri Lanka, in Kenya, in Istanbul, in Barcelona, in Paris, in London. Yes, there is good reason as to why the Sousse killings are so ingrained in the British national consciousness, but Tunisia is not a lone outlier. Of course, there are plenty of holidaymakers who have chosen to move on from that dreadful day. As stated above, there were 278,000 British holidaymakers on Tunisian soil in 2024, the majority of whom flew in for a packaged week of seafront relaxation. While Sousse remains – understandably – a tricky proposition to sell to the British market, there are several alternative possibilities along Tunisia's 713 miles of Mediterranean coastline. If all you want of a holiday is a chance to curl up with a book on a sun-lounger, the resort-hotels of Hammamet, Monastir, Skanes and Mahdia will prove a suitable context. Equally, if you want to peer beyond the beach, Tunisia rewards exploration. 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A decade on from disaster, Tunisia deserves a closer inspection.
