Tunisia launches nationwide manhunt for attack accomplices

The student who massacred holidaymakers on a Tunisian beach and at a swank resort hotel acted alone during the attack but had accomplices who supported him beforehand, an Interior Ministry official said Sunday. Police were searching nationwide for more suspects after the slaughter of at least 38 people in Sousse on Friday, in Tunisia’s deadliest ever such attack. The attacker’s father and three roommates were detained and being questioned in the capital, Tunis, Interior Ministry spokesman Mohamed Ali Aroui told The Associated Press. The attacker has been identified as Seifeddine Rezgui, a 24-year-old graduate of Tunisia’s Kairouan University where he had been living with the other students. The attack was claimed by the radical Islamic State group.

One person alone committed the attack but others helped him for sure.

Interior ministry spokesman Mohamed Ali Aroui

Authorities have yet to suggest a motive for the carnage. A security official close to the investigation said the student frequented an “unofficial” mosque in the Tunisian holy city of Kairouan for the past two years. Friday’s attack on the Imperial Marhaba Hotel shook this North African nation that thrives on tourism and has struggled since its 2011 revolution to be the one Arab Spring country that succeeds in transitioning from authoritarianism to democracy. The bloodshed shocked European nations across the Mediterranean worried for the safety of their citizens who populate Tunisian beaches — and about what it may mean for their own countries in an age of globalized terrorism.

tunisia Africa