Sousse // Stories of remarkable bravery from Tunisian hotel staff are emerging in the aftermath of the Sousse terrorism killings, with some hotel workers forming a “human shield” to protect holidaymakers.
A photograph published by Sky News shows beach workers forming a chain behind the black-clad gunman in a desperate effort to screen tourists from his bullets. Lifeguard Eitham Ben Aisha was among them.
“When I saw him shooting I ran towards him, I said ‘kill us, kill us’,” said Mr Ben Aisha. He was back on duty on Tuesday on the beach near the Marhaba hotel where 38 were slaughtered by the gunman on Friday.
It is likely many more people would have died except for the intervention of scores of life guards and hotel staff.
As the gunman advanced along the beach, spraying gunfire at guests, some of whom were killed on their sunloungers, Mr Ben Aisha and others formed a human shield stretching down the beach, shouting for the gunman to stop.
“We wanted to protect the guests, that was all we thought of,” said Mr Ben Aisha.
Fellow lifeguard Faisel Mihoub said, “We did this [forming the human chain] to stop him shooting more people. I did not think of myself in this moment, I wanted to save the people.”
Two hundred metres away another team of lifeguards and “animators” — organisers of beach sports — also sprang into action.
Sports organiser Moez Arfa saved the life of a British man who had collapsed, wounded by several bullets, on the sand.
With the gunman metres away, Mr Arfa ran to the man and lifted him, only for the man to scream in pain.
“I thought he had been shot only in the arm, but then I see he has a shot in the stomach,” he said.
Carefully he bent down and pulled the man up, held him up and inched his way back down the beach to safety.
Meanwhile, Mr Arfa’s friend Daniel Ben Saad was supervising tourists on jet skis when the gunman appeared on the beach and began shooting.
He quickly got the jet skiers onto the shore, then jumped in his motor boat. He saw a wounded man in a bathing suit staggering away from the shooting down the sand and falling into the sea, a wound from the arm turning the water red. Mr Ben Saad drove the boat inshore, oblivious to the machine gunfire, then put the engine to idle while he hauled the man aboard.
All along the beach, other acts of heroism were going on amid the carnage: 80-year-old Margaret Wolfe, who walks with a stick, and her 59-year-old daughter Cheryl Ireland who needs two sticks after recent knee surgery had staggered from their sun loungers down the beach into the sea. But the women could barely move, and Margaret could not swim.
“I was up to my chin in water, I thought I was going to die,” she said.
But then over the rattle of machine gun came the sound of engines, as two motorboats, each driven by a Tunisian, came roaring into the shallows to pick them up.
“It was a miracle, it was like a film. We cannot thank them enough,” said Ms Wolfe.
Similar acts of heroism were unfolding in the Marhaba hotel itself, with guests remarking that as they fled from the gunman, brave hotel staff were running the other way, desperate to save their guests.
“You have to understand, I don’t save them [the guests] because they are foreigners, but because we are all the same,” said Mr Ben Aisha.
“A Tunisian, an English, Italian, we have the same body, we have the same soul, we have the same dreams, we are the same people.”
The Marhaba hotel is now almost empty, the rows of white plastic sunloungers lined up on the beach, some still spattered with blood.
Nearby, several improvised memorials have been made, one a heart-shaped hollow in the sand festooned with flowers, candles and messages from well-wishers.
Along with the horror, staff fear for their livelihoods, afraid that foreign tourists will now stay away. However, Mr Ben Aisha said several former guests, some of whom come year after year, phoned him from abroad to wish him well.
“One man, he cried when I answered the phone, he said he feared I was dead. We are like a family, us, and the guests on this beach.”
The staff have been grieving too, as some of the tourists who died were returning guests.
“It’s a big catastrophe, all the Tunisian people are sad,” said Mr Mihoub, dressed in a shirt and hat with four feathers protruding from it.
“When I think of those moments now, I tremble.”
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
