Britain falls silent for Tunisia attack victims

LONDON, United Kingdom – Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister David Cameron led a nationwide minute’s silence on Friday, July 3 a week after a jihadist gun massacre in Tunisia in which 30 out of the 38 victims were Britons.

Flags flew at half-mast and tennis fans at Wimbledon fell silent at midday to honor the victims of the worst terror attack on Britons since the 2005 London bombings, as Tunisian Prime Minister Habib Essid admitted the police took too long to react.

“The time of the reaction – this is the problem,” Essid told the BBC.

“We feel really sorry about what happened,” he said.

“They were our guests. They came to spend their vacation with us, but what happened is a horror, unacceptable,” he said.

Employees of travel group TUI, which includes operators Thomson and First Choice that organized the holidays of all of the British victims, stood in silence outside the company’s headquarters.

There was also a ceremony outside Walsall football stadium in central England in tribute to 3 local men from the same family who died in the tragedy.

The only surviving family member from the holiday, 16-year-old Owen Richards, observed the silence wearing the club’s red shirt and holding his mother’s hand with fellow mourners outside the grounds.

‘Remember Tunisia’

The moment of remembrance for the attack claimed by the Islamic State (IS, formerly known as ISIS or the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq) group comes a day after the British government raised the possibility of extending air strikes against ISIS jihadists from Iraq to Syria.

The queen and her husband Prince Philip joined in the silence during a visit to Strathclyde University in Glasgow, while Cameron marked the moment in his Witney constituency northwest of London.

The profile picture on the prime minister’s Twitter account was changed to a sign reading “Remember Tunisia” with the first word written in red.

Britain has launched an investigation into the killings and the police said that they had so far taken 275 witness accounts and that more than 1,200 potential witnesses had returned to Britain.

A special ceremony was also held at the scene of the killings on a sunny beach near Sousse, with dozens of officials and tourists in attendance as Tunisia stepped up security at its holiday resorts.

The killings were the worst-ever massacre in Tunisia, which fears massive damage to its tourism industry.

The sector accounts for about 7% of gross domestic product in a country already suffering from the upheaval that followed the 2011 overthrow of dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Wimbledon joins in mourning 

At Wimbledon, the start of matches was delayed by 45 minutes to 12:15pm (1115 GMT) to allow spectators and tennis players to take part.

The bodies of 25 of the British victims have now been repatriated on a military transport plane to Royal Air Force base Brize Norton.

The final 5 will be returned on Saturday, July 4.

The remains will be released to the families following post-mortem examinations.

Three Irish nationals, two Germans, one Belgian, one Portuguese and one Russian were also among the dead. (READ: Tunisia identifies all 38 victims of beach massacre, 30 British)

The attack also comes as Britain prepares to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the July 7, 2005 attacks in which 4 suicide bombers killed 52 people on London’s transport network.

Tunisia on Thursday, July 2 said 8 people had been arrested in connection with the massacre carried out by 23-year-old student Seifeddine Rezgui, who gunned down foreign tourists after pulling a Kalashnikov assault rifle from a beach umbrella.

The attack was the second on tourists in Tunisia claimed by IS in 3 months, after the extremist group said it was behind a March attack on the National Bardo Museum in Tunis that killed 22 people.

Tunisian authorities have said Rezgui received weapons training from jihadists in neighboring Libya, traveling to the chaos-wracked country at the same time as the two young Tunisians behind the Bardo attack.

In the past 4 years, dozens of police and soldiers have been killed in Tunisia in clashes and ambushes attributed to jihadists – mainly in the western Chaambi Mountains. (READ: World leaders condemn string of ‘barbaric’ attacks)

Disillusionment and social exclusion have fueled radicalism among young Tunisians, with the country exporting some 3,000 jihadist fighters to Iraq, Syria and Libya. – Dario Thuburn, AFP/Rappler.com