London: A wounded British holidaymaker has told how she survived the Tunisia beach massacre by playing dead as the gunman shot her husband beside her.
Cheryl and Stephen Mellor huddled under a sunlounger before they were seen by Saif Al Deen Rezgui as he prowled the grounds of the Imperial Marhaba Hotel.
He opened fire.
Cheryl Mellor was badly hurt and lay beside her husband, who is believed to be among the dead, for 20 minutes waiting for help to arrive.
On Saturday, she told The Daily Telegraph she wished she had been killed because it would have been “easier”.
She was one of nine tourists to be seriously injured in the worst terror attack to strike Britons since the 7/7 bombings in London.
The Foreign Office faced accusations that it had failed to do enough, with some relatives revealing that they had only discovered their loved ones were injured or killed after watching television footage.
Cheryl Mellor, 55, who was told at the scene her husband was dead, but has not been given official confirmation, said: “I wish I had gone as well. It would have been so much easier. He’s gone and I’m still here.”
The couple, from Bodmin, Cornwall, were doing crosswords on their sunloungers when the attack began.
“There was a bang, like an explosion, then we heard the gunshots,” she said while being treated in the Sahloul hospital in Sousse.
“Steve said ‘quick get down’. We lay under the sunlounger together saying ‘I love you, I love you, I love you’.
“Then I saw him. He pointed the gun at me and he shot me twice, once in the leg, once in the hand. I thought ‘this is it, I’m going to die’.
“Then Steve said ‘we’ve got to go, we’ve got to run’. That’s when he was shot. I just lay there pretending to be dead. There was lots of screaming and panicking going on. I kept hearing gunshots closer then further away.”
When the shooting ended another hotel guest tended to Cheryl Mellor’s wounds, but was unable to find signs of life in her husband.
