– ‘I saw someone get shot’ –
Witnesses described scenes of panic after the shooting at the hotel on the outskirts of Sousse, about 140 kilometres (90 miles) south of the capital Tunis.
“All I saw was a gun and an umbrella being dropped,” British tourist Ellie Makin told ITV television.
“Then he started firing to the right-hand side of us. If he had fired to the left I don’t know what would have happened, but we were very lucky.”
The shooting was the worst in modern-day Tunisia and followed a March attack claimed by IS on Tunis’s Bardo National Museum that killed 21 foreign tourists and a policeman.
British tourist Gary Pine told Britain’s Sky News television Friday’s attack happened when the beach was packed. He counted 20-30 shots.
“My son was in the sea at the time and of course my wife and myself were shouting for him to get out the sea quick and as we ran up the beach he said: ‘I just saw someone get shot’.”
Briton Olivia Leathley, 24, heard “loud bangs” and when she went to the lobby to find out what was happening, she saw a woman whose husband had “been shot in the stomach in front of her”.
“All she said was that he’d been shot and that he was there bleeding on the beach and he was just saying, ‘I love you, I love you’, and then his eyes rolled back into his head.”
Another woman described how her fiance was shot three times while trying to protect her and was in intensive care in hospital.
“I owe him my life because he threw himself in front of me when the shooting started,” 26-year-old holidaymaker Saera Wilson told the BBC.
By the early hours of Saturday morning, hundreds of tourists were arriving at Enfidha airport in a mad scramble to leave the country, according to an AFP journalist on the scene.
– New security measures –
Essid on Saturday announced new anti-terrorism measures, including the deployment of reserve troops to reinforce security at “sensitive sites… and places that could be targets of terrorist attacks”.
The “exceptional plan to better secure tourist and archaeological sites” will include “deploying armed tourist security officers all along the coast and inside hotels from 1 July,” he added.
Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi told AFP that his country cannot stand up to the jihadist threat alone, and urged a unified global strategy.
In Cairo, leading Sunni Muslim institution Al-Azhar called the “heinous” shooting a “violation of all religious and humanitarian norms”.
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