26th June, 2015
A 16-year-old British boy injured when a gunman stormed a tourist beach in Tunisia saw his mother and grandmother killed in front of him, doctors said on Friday, on a day which saw presumed Islamist terrorists strike on three continents.
Doctors at a clinic in the Tunisian resort of El-Kantaoui, north of Sousse, told local radio the boy was among 11 Britons they were treating after the attack, which killed 37 people, including at least five Britons along with Germans, Belgians and Irish tourists, and injured 36 more.
Officials were expecting the British death toll to rise into double figures and become the country’s greatest loss of life from any single act of violence since the London 7/7 attacks of 2005.
The gunman had landed on the beach from a small rubber-hulled speedboat before spraying bullets into the crowds of sun-bathers. Eye-witnesses said he was singling out Britons and other Europeans.
As well as the 16-year-old boy, who has yet to be formally identified, the injured included Matthew James, 30, who was shot four times in the stomach while protecting his fiancee, Sarah Wilson.
“He took a bullet for me,” she said outside the hospital. “I owe him my life because he threw himself in front of me when the shooting started. He was covered in blood from the shots but he just told me to run away.
“He told me, ‘I love you, babe. But just go – tell our children that their daddy loves them.’
“It was the bravest thing I’ve ever known. But I just had to leave him under the sunbed because the shooting just kept on coming.
“I ran back, past bodies on the beach to reach our hotel. It was chaos – there was a body in the hotel pool and it was just full of blood.”
The attack was the third of the day by militants believed to be loyal to or inspired by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and its crippled leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
In the morning, a man, later named as Yassin Salhi, tried to detonate gas canisters at an industrial gases factory near Lyon in south-east France.
A decapitated head – apparently that of his boss at the delivery firm where he worked – was found with Arabic writing and a black jihadist flag attached to a fence nearby.
Salhi was said to have had no criminal record but to have been monitored previously for signs of “radicalisation”.
Shortly afterwards, in Kuwait, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives vest in a Shia mosque packed with worshippers for Friday noon prayers.
The attack, which killed at least 25 people and injured more than 200, was immediately claimed by the “Najd Province of Islamic State”, a new branch of the terrorist group which sent suicide bombers into two Shia mosques in neighbouring Saudi Arabia last month. Najd is in central Saudi Arabia.
It is not clear whether the three attacks were connected or co-ordinated. But Isil’s chief spokesman, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, issued an audiotape warning on Tuesday that Ramadan, the Muslim holy fasting month which began last week, would bring “calamity for the kuffars (infidels)”.
• Were Tunisia, France, Kuwait attacks co-ordinated by Islamic State for Ramadan?
There were also massacres by Isil jihadists in the Syrian town of Kobane, and by the al-Qaeda-linked Shabab movement of African Union peace-keepers in Somalia.
World leaders were united in outrage and by promises of further action to co-ordinate a response.
David Cameron, the Prime Minister, summoned an immediate meeting of the Cobra emergency response committee. “This is a threat that faces all of us,” he said, at the end of the European Council summit in Brussels. “These events have taken place today in Tunisia and in France but they can happen anywhere. We all face this threat.”
He said there should be a focus on improving counter-terrorism co-operation, but that taking on the jihadist radicalisation of young people was perhaps “more important”.
“Perhaps more important than anything is poisonous radical narrative that is turning so many young minds and we have to combat it with everything we have,” he said.
In the United States, President Barack Obama was briefed before addressing a memorial service for the victims of the church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, last week.
“We stand with these nations as they respond to attacks on their soil today,” the White House said.
Tunisia has become a key target for jihadist attacks. It is the one Arab country that has transitioned relatively successfully to democracy following the Arab Spring, and remained open to western values. But at the same time it has contributed more foreign jihadists to the war in Syria than anywhere else.
Culled from Telegraph.co.uk