Tunis: Tunisia announced a string of new security measures on Saturday, including closing renegade mosques and calling up army reservists as thousands of tourists left the North African country in wake of its worst terrorist attack ever.
Tourists crowded into the airport at Hammamet near the coastal city of Sousse where a young man dressed in shorts on Friday pulled an assault rifle out of his beach umbrella and killed 38 people, mostly tourists.
“The fight against terrorism is a national responsibility,” visibly exhausted Prime Minister Habib Al Sid said at a news conference in Tunis. “We are at war against terrorism which represents a serious danger to national unity during this delicate period that the nation is going through.”
The attack came the same day that a suicide bomber killed 27 people in a Shiite mosque in Kuwait and a man in France ran his truck into a warehouse and hung his employer’s severed head on the gate.
Al Sid announced the call-up of army reservists and said they would be deployed in tourist sites around the country and inside hotels, while he called on the hotels themselves to do more to enforce security.
He also said that political parties and associations espousing radical ideas with suspicious funding would be closed down and around 80 mosques known for extremist preaching would be shut.
The attacker, who was killed by security forces, was identified as Saif Al Deen Rezgui, a young student at Kairouan University. A tweet from Daesh claimed responsibility for the attack and gave his pseudonym of Abu Yahya Al Qayrawani, according to the Site intelligence group.
The attack in Kuwait was also claimed by Daesh and on Saturday thousands of people took part in a mass funeral procession. Kuwait’s interior ministry said it had detained the owner of a vehicle which the suicide bomber used.
The interior ministry said it was now looking for the driver who vanished shortly after Friday’s blast in Kuwait.
The ministry also said that it had raised security at oil facilities to maximum level and several suspects were detained for questioning in connection with the bombing.
