Gunman Focused on Tourists in Slaughter at a Tunisian Beach Hotel

Dressed in black shorts and a T-shirt, the young man walked purposefully along the beach but looked much like a tourist - until he unwrapped an assault rifle and opened fire, first into the sand and then in an arc at sunbathers.

"He seemed like he did not know how to handle the weapon, because it is heavy," said one witness, Hassen, 30, who declined to give his full name. "He seemed not to be experienced."

Yet the gunman was silent and businesslike, Hassen and other witnesses said Saturday. As the tourists fled and saw friends falling, he pursued the sunbathers from the beach to the pool and eventually to the administration offices on the second floor of the Imperial Marhaba Hotel here, killing 39 people and wounding 38 others in all on Friday.

Later identified by the authorities as a 23-year-old Tunisian student, Seifeddine Rezgui, the gunman was eventually shot and killed by a policeman, but not before carrying out Tunisia's worst terrorist attack in living memory.

The only words he uttered were to tell Tunisians to get away. It was tourists, he made clear, he wanted to kill. Fifteen of them were British, a spokesman for the British Embassy in Tunis said, a number that is expected to rise as more bodies are identified. About the same number of Britons were injured, he said.

"Something was not right," said Christine Callaghan, a middle-aged woman from Norfolk, England, describing the moment she first heard the gunshots as she lay with her husband by the pool. "It was very long and very loud," she said, from her hospital bed on Saturday. "My husband screamed out: 'Quick, run!'"

The tourists fled in their bathing suits into the hotel through the dining room, piling up mattresses in a corridor for protection, and barricading themselves into a banquet hall as they heard gunfire and explosions.

In the rush Callaghan lost sight of her husband. "He thought I was in front of him, but I was behind," she said.

As the tourists barricaded the doors, Callaghan was locked out, trapped in the corridor as the gunman approached. "I was shot in the femur and fell down. Another lady was shot four times and her leg was across my tummy," she said tearfully.

"She was shot in the stomach. Her husband, Joe - his shirt was completely splattered with blood - was talking to her to keep her awake," she recounted.

The two women lay there for 45 minutes, as Joe desperately called for help, until finally hotel staff crept along the corridor and began carrying people out.

Callaghan and many of the hotel guests never saw the lone gunman but just heard the shooting.

But a group of Tunisians, who run paragliding tours on the beach in front of the hotel, saw the gunman and even tried to remonstrate with him. The witness Hassen was among them.

Rezgui was originally from Gaafour in Siliana, with no known police record, Tunisian officials said.  

He had completed a technical degree with good scores and attendance record at college in the city of Kairouan and was pursuing further studies in a master's program. He was the holder of a passport but had never used it, Prime Minister Habib Essid of Tunisia said, describing the attack as that of a "lone wolf."

Tunisia has struggled to contain an insurgency along its border with Algeria, but a greater problem seems to stem from sleeper cells established by the group Ansar al-Shariah, whose leaders are longtime members of al-Qaida and are now based in Syria and Libya, and connected to the Islamic State. Since December a group of Tunisians in Syria have called on fellow Tunisians to rise up against their government and have threatened to put fire to the country in the name of an Islamic caliphate.

The Tunisian government has responded to the attack, the second in three months in which a large number of foreign tourists have been killed, with a security crackdown. Essid said that army reinforcements would support security forces guarding important locations, and would seal off several areas along the border with Algeria as military zones.

He also announced the closing of 80 mosques that were being investigated for extremist links and said that permits for political parties, civil society organizations and associations would be reviewed. Yet the actions were already being criticized by activists on social media and by members of the public as too little too late.

Even after the attack on the National Bardo Museum in Tunis in March, in which 21 foreign tourists were killed by two gunmen, the government had not properly secured its tourist areas along the coast. The tourist police and security guards at hotels are typically not armed, and the prime minister said that from now on they would be armed and would guard the beach and the interior of the hotel.

The gunman made it plain that the foreigners were his target. Hospital employees in Sousse said seven Tunisians were among the 38 injured, though the gunman made an effort to spare some.

Imen Kashish, a Tunisian mother of three, lay in the city hospital, her face drawn in pain from shrapnel wounds. Her sister, Ines Kashish, who was at her bedside, recounted events that Imen had described.

Imen Kashish had tried to flee to the roof with hotel guests and workers, her sister said. Then someone said the roof would also be dangerous.

As she stood in the corridor wondering where to go, she felt a burning pain as a grenade exploded, peppering her legs and back with shrapnel.

"When she fell to the ground, he put a gun to her face," her sister recounted, standing outside her hospital ward. "She said to him: 'For God's sake,' and he did not shoot. He went on and shot two tourists further on."

After some 30 minutes the gunman went back to the beach and made a phone call. That was when some of the Tunisians approached him.

"He made a call for about a minute and then threw the phone in the water," Hassen said. Photographs from the scene show him strolling almost nonchalantly away on the beach. The only words he spoke, they said, were these: "I am not here for you."