TUNIS // Tunisia’s president declared a state of emergency on Saturday in response to a second deadly attack on foreigners in three months, saying that the country is “not safe” and risks collapse from further extremist attacks.
In a nationwide televised address, Beji Caid Essebsi officially reintroduced urgent security measures that had been lifted in March 2014, saying that the state of emergency would last for 30 days.
He said an “exceptional situation required exceptional measures” but pledged to respect freedom of expression.
“Tunisia faces a very serious danger and it should take any possible measures to maintain security and safety,” he said. “As we see in other countries, if attacks like Sousse happen again, the country will collapse.”
An aide to the Tunisian prime minister said on Saturday that several officials had been sacked after last Friday’s attack on a beach resort that killed 38 tourists.
“Just as there have been security failures, there have also been political failures,” said the prime minister’s communications adviser, Dhafer Neji.
He said that those fired included the governor of the Sousse region where the ISIL-claimed massacre took place, as well as police officials.
Among the policemen dismissed were three from Sousse, one from the northwestern city of Gaafour – the hometown of the gunman who carried out the attack in the tourist resort of Port El Kantaoui – and one from the city of Kairouan where the attacker was studying, Mr Neji added.
Mr Essebsi, meanwhile, blamed the poor security in neighbouring Libya for Tunisia’s problems, as well as the lack of international resolve in targeting ISIL throughout the region. He said that Tunisia specifically had been a target of the extremist group because it had a functioning, secular democracy.
The gunman behind the attack, 23-year-old Seifeddine Rezgui, was killed by police and ISIL later claimed responsibility. Thirty of the 38 dead in the attack were British tourists.
In March, gunmen killed 22 people, again mostly tourists, at The National Bardo Museum outside Tunis.
Tunisia’s government has promised new laws to increase police powers and allow for harsher penalties for terrorism convictions. Immediately after the Sousse attack, the prime minister pledged to post armed guards at tourist sites and close mosques outside government control.
The security forces were criticised after the attack for not reacting quickly enough, after witnesses said that at least 30 minutes elapsed before police arrived.
On Friday, the authorities admitted for the first time that there had been security failures, with prime minister Habib Essid saying: “The time of the reaction – this is the problem.”
The country was under a state of emergency from January 2011, at the outbreak of the Arab Spring, until March 2014. It initially included a curfew and a ban on meetings of more than three people. Although those measures were relaxed, police and the military retained powers to intervene in unrest or for security reasons.
* Associated Press with additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
