On June 26, Rezgui opened fire on a beach in Sousse and chased people into the Imperial Marhaba Hotel where he sprayed them with bullets and lobbed homemade explosives at them.
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Tourists fled yelling, as the 23-year old pulled out a Kalashnikov assault rifle from under a rolled up umbrella and starting randomly shooting outside one of the country’s five-star hotels.
His mother Radhia Manai, 49, has now spoken out following the attack, and said she believes her son was brainwashed.
Revealing more details about the gunman to a French-language newspaper La Presse., PM Habib Essid said that the attacker was a member of a dance club and was familiar with the tourism sector, having worked in it as an events organiser, the AFP reported.
The bodies of all 30 Britons killed in the attack have been repatriated and inquests into their deaths are continuing to open today.
The mother of the Tunisian beach gunman has said her son once refused to kill a mouse because he “couldn’t kill anything”.
Police shot him dead as he headed onto the main road, away from the devastation and bloodshed he had caused. “I couldn’t believe it. Once there was mouse in the house and I asked Seifeddine to kill it and he refused saying, “I can’t kill anything””, she told the Sunday Times.
“God bless the victims, all those people and their poor families, and I feel so sorry but I want to tell them it wasn’t my son who did this, it was a different Seifeddine”, said Manai. Maybe they said: ‘Do this or we’ll kill you.’ My son is a victim like all the others.
His father Hakim Rezgui, 48, a labourer, told the paper he thought the police had come to say his son had not completed military service.
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“There is a real fear that declaring the state of emergency will lead to the criminalization of social protests”, said Hamza Meddeb of the Carnegie Middle East Center.
