Grim news came for Britain on Tuesday as the number of confirmed British fatalities in last week’s terror attack at a Tunisia beach resort climbed to 21.
A Downing Street spokeswoman told CNN the number could rise to 30, in line with the authorities’ worst fears. Dozens more people were injured in the Friday attack.
Four of the most seriously wounded Britons arrived back in the United Kingdom early Tuesday, flown home on a military plane to receive treatment.
The gun rampage that killed 38 people is the most significant attack against British citizens since the London transport bombings 10 years ago.
The UK government has declared that a minute’s silence will be marked nationwide Friday, a week after so many lost their lives.
One Belgian, one German and three Irish citizens are also confirmed as being among the dead.
Tunisian Interior Minister Najem Gharsalli, speaking at a joint press conference Monday with his German, French and British counterparts in Sousse, said his country had made its first arrests in connection with the attack.
“We have started by arresting a first group, the important part of the network that was behind this terrorist criminal,” Gharsalli said.
The Tunisian government has announced plans to arm its tourist police on beaches in an attempt to protect the fragile — but economically important — tourism industry.
But CNN teams in Tunisia say the additional security at tourist sites does not yet appear to be in place.
Tourists come to terms with terror, grief
Some holidaymakers chose to cut short their vacation in the wake of the bloody attack by a gunman whom authorities identified as Saif Al-Deen Al Rezgui, 24.
But others remain on the golden beaches that have helped make this stretch of Tunisia’s Mediterranean coast so popular with foreign tourists.
British couple David and Jean Rapetti, in Tunisia to celebrate their 55th wedding anniversary, are among those who decided to stay.
“We were probably about 30 yards or 30 meters away from the gunman. Which was near enough anyhow. And I was … frightened,” David Rapetti told CNN.
They witnessed the man firing and saw three people lying on the ground, their condition unclear, before finding shelter in a small room.
Staying on in Tunisia has helped them to make sense of what happened, Rapetti said. But his hardest moment since has been seeing people in terrible emotional turmoil on the beach in front of the Hotel Riu Imperial Marhaba where the attack began.
“It wasn’t us that was suffering, it was other people that were suffering — and to come to terms with their terror and their grief has taken us a lot of time,” he said.
Link to Libyan terror group?
ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attack, but it is unclear if the Islamist group had any direct role in it.
ISIS has posted a photo of the alleged attacker, Al Rezgui, from the town of Gaafour, about 160 kilometers (100 miles) northeast of Sousse.
A spokesman for Tunisia’s Interior Ministry told CNN that Al Rezgui had a connection to a Libyan terrorist organization. However, Mohammed Ali Aroui said it was unclear whether the gunman had a link to the Ansar Al-Sharia militant group or ISIS in Libya.
Police have also not yet confirmed whether Al Rezgui had ever traveled to Libya, he added.
The shooting was one of three terrorist attacks on three continents that followed one another in frightening succession Friday, also rocking France and Kuwait.
Fresh details emerged Tuesday from France, where Paris prosecutor François Molins said a man accused of beheading his boss and displaying the corpse with Islamic flags had sent images of his gruesome actions to a contact in Syria.
Courage of hotel workers, guests
In Tunisia, accounts of bravery have emerged from the horror and confusion of the brief gun rampage.
Amateur video filmed during the attack showed beach and hotel workers running toward a man they knew to have gunned down hotel guests just moments earlier.
British Home Secretary Theresa May reflected on that courage in remarks Monday as she visited the scene of the attack with fellow European interior ministers.
“I’ve heard of the stories, the horror stories of people who went through this, and our thoughts are with the victims and the families,” May said, “but I have also heard stories of great bravery as well — the young man who shielded his fiancée from the bullets, the staff at the hotel who protected their guests.”
Meanwhile, authorities in Britain are staging a two-day counterterrorism exercise in London on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The largest such exercise to date, it will involve hundreds of government staff and Metropolitan Police officers. It was planned long before Friday’s events unfolded but will seek to test emergency workers’ capacity to respond to a major attack by armed terrorists.
