The Press and Journal (Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire)
Relatives of Tunisian terror victims to tackle travel firm
Court: Judge rules against a finding of ‘neglect’ by Thomson owner TUI
Grieving relatives of British tourists killed in the 2015 Tunisia terror attack are preparing to sue travel firm TUI over the deaths of their loved ones at the hands of an Islamic extremist.
Lawyers said they planned civil proceedings against the tour operator after the coroner conducting the inquests of the 30 Britons murdered on the Mediterranean coast, in Sousse, ruled that they were unlawfully killed.
However, Judge Nicholas Loraine-Smith ruled against a finding of “neglect” by Thomson owner TUI, or the owners of the Riu Imperial Marhaba where radicalised mass killer Seifeddine Rezgui slaughtered 38 people, including three Irish citizens.
The families of the dead, many of whom wept as the inquests’ conclusions were read out yesterday, were highly critical of security at the hotel, which only had a handful of unarmed guards on duty when Rezgui struck armed with an AK47 assault rifle and homemade grenades.
They also believed that TUI did not do enough to warn holidaymakers before they booked about the dangers in Tunisia, which had suffered a fatal terrorist attack in the capital Tunis just three months earlier.
This included making them aware of official Foreign Office travel advice which warned of a high threat of terrorism.
Kylie Hutchison, from law firm Irwin Mitchell, which represents 22 victims’ families, said they had heard “shocking evidence about the level of security precautions at the Imperial Marhaba Hotel at the time of the terrorist attack”.
Speaking outside the Royal Courts of Justice after the inquests finished, she said: “It is now crucial that the whole travel industry learns from what happened in Sousse to reduce the risk of similar catastrophic incidents in the future.We will now be preparing to commence civil proceedings against TUI.”
The inquest had heard from a holidaymaker who said his wife raised the March 2015 attack at the Bardo Museum in Tunis with a travel agent, and said they had been told it was a “one-off” and that Sousse was “100% safe”.
A Thomson travel agent previously told the inquest that she did not give a safety guarantee to the couple, and that she would not say somewhere is completely safe. Summing up the evidence heard during the inquest, the judge referred to the response of police and military, who were criticised for deliberately stalling their arrival to avoid tackling Rezgui. He said: “The response by the police was at best shambolic, at worst cowardly.”