Tunisia charges six hotel guards over beach attack

Six hotel security guards have been charged with failing to help tourists during a 2015 terror attack at a Tunisian resort, it has been reported.

Tunisian authorities are said to have arrested a further 14 people in connection with the massacre in Sousse that left three Irish citizens dead.

Another 12 people are said to be under investigation.

The news comes after a British judge said the police response to the attack, in which 30 Britons also died, was “at best shambolic, at worst cowardly”.

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Sofian Sliti, a spokesman for judicial counter-terrorism investigations in Tunisia, told Reuters the guards from the Imperial Marhaba Hotel in Sousse had been charged with failing to help people in danger in a manner that caused their deaths.

On Tuesday, British judge Nicholas Loraine-Smith ruled the British victims of the attack had been killed unlawfully, at the conclusion of an inquest in London.

Following the verdict, victims' relatives said they planned to sue travel firm TUI over the deaths, which came just months after a separate fatal attack in Tunis.

Impact on tourism

On Wednesday, a Tunisian official provoked anger by suggesting the country had suffered more than Britain due to the attack, in which a total of 38 people died, due to its impact on tourism.

Lazhar Akremi told the London Times: "You lost 30 people. But the suffering is bigger for the Tunisian people.

“I mean, the reputation of the country was ruined, tourism was destroyed.”

PA