Tunisia police let down beach victims: inquiry

“Cowardly” Tunisian security forces let down the victims of a shooting at a beach hotel, making “deliberate and unjustifiable” delays in their journey to the scene, a UK inquiry found yesterday.A gunman killed 30 Britons and eight other nationals on a Tunisian beach resort in 2015, having walked nearly two miles on his killing spree before being shot dead by security forces.Islamic State claimed responsibility.Summing up after a six-week inquest, Judge Nicholas Loraine-Smith severely criticised the security forces, saying that their response had been “at best shambolic, and at worst cowardly”.An inquest by Tunisian authorities was also critical of local security forces’ response.Loraine-Smith did however praise the “conspicuous personal courage” showed by some staff and guests and said neither the tour operator nor the hotel had been neglectful in the unlawful killings.The British victims had booked their trips through Thomson Holidays, which is owned by TUI Group.Families of those killed have been critical of TUI for not highlighting British government warnings around travel to Tunisia in their advertising for holidays, and not making it easier to cancel trips following a previous attack in Tunis.The resort attack took place in Sousse, 140km south of Tunis, three months after an attack on a museum in Tunis, with foreign tourists taken hostage.Loraine-Smith said that TUI did not update their website following the Tunis attack, and the firm’s phone operators did not direct concerned customers to the government’s travel advice for Tunisia in the wake of the museum shooting.While critical of the security arrangements at the Tunisian hotel, Loraine-Smith said that the case did not meet the requirements for a finding of “neglect”, as the tourists went on holiday freely.In Britain, a coroner’s inquest establishes the facts of an incident but does not assign legal blame or guilt.The bereaved families of some of the British victims of the Tunisian terror attack are to sue Thomson holidays’ owner, Tui, after a coroner ruled all 30 were unlawfully killed.After relatives listened tearfully to Loraine-Smith’s summing up, in which he rejected an argument by the families that neglect by the tour operator played a part in the tragedy, a solicitor for 22 of the victims’ families said her clients would launch civil proceedings against Tui, with whom all 30 had booked their trip.With a group of bereaved relatives standing behind her, Kylie Hutchison,a solicitor at Irwin Mitchell, said: “It is now crucial that the whole travel industry learns from what happened in Sousse to reduce the risk of similar catastrophic incidents in the future.“On behalf of our clients who lost members of their family and those who suffered injuries in this terrible incident, we will now be preparing to commence civil proceedings against Tui.”Speaking outside the court, Tui’s UK managing director, Nick Longman,said the company was “so very sorry” for the “pain and loss those affected have suffered”.He added: “As an industry we have adapted and we will need to continue to do so.”Hundreds of tourists were sunbathing outside the Imperial Marhaba hotel when jihadi Seifeddine Rezgui opened fire with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, killing 38 people, 30 of them British, in a rampage that lasted about 30 minutes. Rezgui was shot dead by Tunisian authorities as he ran from the hotel.Lawyers representing the families had urged the coroner to rule that neglect played a part in their loved ones’ deaths alongside a conventional finding of unlawful killing.But Loraine-Smith told the inquest that legal precedents prevented inquests from applying that conclusion to tourists on holiday because they were not “dependent” on the travel company or hotel.