AFRICA

Tunisia Gunmen Kill 19 at Museum, Dealing a Blow to Tourism

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Visitors Flee Scene of Tunisia Attack

Visitors Flee Scene of Tunisia Attack

Scenes from Tunisian state television showed confusion outside an art museum and Parliament on Wednesday after gunmen attacked.
 March 18, 2015. Photo by Hassene Dridi/Associated Press.
CAIRO — Gunmen in military uniforms killed 19 people on Wednesday in a midday attack on a museum in downtown Tunis, dealing a new blow to the tourist industry that is vital to Tunisia as it struggles to consolidate the only transition to democracy after the Arab Spring revolt.
Tunisian officials had initially said that the attackers took 10 hostages and killed nine people, including seven foreign visitors and two Tunisians. When security forces retook the museum about four hours later, however, the death toll more than doubled, raising questions about how and at what point the hostages had died.
Prime Minister Habib Essid said in a news conference that security forces had killed two gunmen inside the museum but that two or three accomplices might still be at large. He said 17 foreign visitors, including Polish, Italian, Spanish and German tourists, as well as two Tunisians, one of whom was a member of the security forces, were killed in the attack. At least 22 others were injured.
Mr. Essid urged national unity, calling the attack “the first operation of its kind ever to occur in Tunisia” because it struck the crucial tourist economy. “We will show no compassion and no mercy in defending our country,” he said.
Tunisian security services officers took up a position after gunmen held hostages at the National Bardo Museum, near the country’s parliamentary buildings.Mohamed Messara/European Pressphoto Agency 
The two gunmen killed were believed to be Tunisians, he said. Yet their identity and motivation were not immediately clear and there was no claim of responsibility.
Tunisia is the Arab world’s most successful democracy, recently completing its first free presidential elections and a peaceful rotation of political power. But its security forces have also struggled to quash occasional attacks by Islamist extremists, especially in its mountains, and Tunisia has emerged as one of the biggest sources of foreign fighters joining the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, in Syria and Iraq.
Democracy has provided new freedom of speech for the group’s recruiters, and it is easy to find young Tunisians captivated by promises of justice and opportunity as they struggle under the weight of an economy suffering from years of tumult and an abusive police force left over from the old authoritarian system.
There was no specific evidence by Wednesday night linking the museum attack to the Islamic State, but its supporters circulated celebratory messages on social media, often citing a video released online in December.
In it, Boubakr Hakim, a Tunisian militant known as Abu Moqatel, urged support for the Islamic State, claimed responsibility for the earlier assassinations of two left-leaning Tunisian politicians, and warned of attacks to come. “You will not live in safety as long as Tunisia is not ruled by Islam,” he said.
Some reports said that the Parliament, which convenes in a building adjacent to the museum in the historic Bardo district of the capital, had been debating legislation to combat terrorism as the attack began. Tunisian officials said Wednesday that attackers might have originally sought to target Parliament itself and then shifted to the adjacent museum, the National Bardo Museum, because of its less formidable security.
National
Bardo Museum
National
Parliament
250 FT
1/2 mile
TUNIS
Bardo Museum
Location of attack
Tunis
Mediterranean
Sea
TUNISIA
Lake Sijoumi
By The New York Times; satellite image by DigitalGlobe via Google Earth 
Gunshots were heard in the area at around 12:30 p.m., just as buses from cruise ships docked in the harbor were unloading hundreds of tourists, witnesses said. The two gunmen, moving easily through the crowds because of their uniforms, were armed with grenades and Kalashnikovs, officials said.
Noriko Yuki, 35, a Japanese tourist, reached Tunis on Wednesday morning on a cruise from Italy with her mother, Nobuku. They heard bullets flying over their heads and dropped to the ground, the younger Ms. Yuki said, but one wounded her cheek.
“I started shaking my mother to see if she was alive but she was not responding,” Ms. Yuki said in an interview at the hospital where she was taken by the police. “I lost track of her.”
Most of the crowds escaped. Military helicopters swooped overhead, the Parliament building was evacuated and the district was closed off. Video on state television showed terrified tourists crouching and scurrying out of a doorway and up a stairway, guided by heavily armed riot police. Both the police and tourists glanced nervously skyward, as though afraid of a gunman on a nearby rooftop.
The siege ended in the death of the two gunmen within four hours of the initial attack. But it now poses a new test of Tunisia’s democratic transition, coming less than five months after the election of the first Parliament and the first president since the 2011 ouster of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the longtime dictator.
Complaints about a failure to stop lesser attacks by Islamist extremists dogged Ennahda, the moderate Islamist party that led the constituent assembly elected after the revolution. The newly elected president, Beji Caid Essebsi, a former interior minister under the old autocracy who campaigned on the promise of a restoration of stability and a crackdown on extremism, and his anti-Islamist political faction won a plurality of the new Parliament.
A victim was evacuated on Wednesday from the National Bardo Museum in Tunis after a siege by gunmen that lasted four hours. Hassene Dridi/Associated Press 
The bloodshed on Wednesday raised fears that the new government might be tempted to turn back toward authoritarianism in its effort to stamp out terrorist threats. It also raised questions about whether Mr. Essebsi’s more-secular faction might now be blamed for failing to solve the problem more effectively than the Islamists who led the transition.
Ennahda called for a public rally against terrorism on Wednesday evening and “a national conference to set a comprehensive counter-terrorism strategy.” But in television appearances, its officials also criticized what they called a lack of transparency about the death of the hostages and the police operation.
The Bardo Museum houses a large collection of antiquities, including many important mosaics dating from the Roman and Carthaginian era, as well as Phoenician and Byzantine ceramics, statuary and jewelry.
In Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, militants have sometimes destroyed ancient cultural artifacts that they deemed un-Islamic. But Unesco, the United Nations cultural agency, said in a statement Wednesday evening that there was no sign of damage to the museum or its collection.
The assault appeared to be the deadliest terror attack in Tunisia since 2002, when a truck filled with propane was detonated outside a synagogueon the island of Djerba. It killed 21 people, including some European tourists.
Since the revolution in 2011, the Tunisian authorities have struggled to eradicate Islamist militants in regions far from the coast, but the assault on Wednesday was especially damaging because European tourists are the lifeblood of the Tunisian economy and its main source of foreign currency.
The office of President François Hollande of France confirmed late Wednesday that two French citizens had died in the Tunis attack, and seven others were wounded.
In Italy, a spokesman for the Italian Foreign Ministry said at least three Italians had been among those killed in the attack, and at least six had been wounded.
Piero Fassino, the mayor of Turin, Italy, told Italian television that six City Hall employees were there, but that only two had been heard from. “We are waiting for news with a certain anguish,” he said.
Reporting was contributed by Farid Farid, Hend Hassassi and Farah Samti from Tunis; Maïa de la Baume from Paris, Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome, Mayy El Sheikh from Cairo, and Tom Mashberg from Boston.