SOUSSE, Tunisia — 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 on 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 Mrs. 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, Mrs. 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.
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