Tunisia attack: 'He looked right at me – I thought I was dead,' says tourist

Briton Tom Richards came face-to-face with a gunman behind the attacks in Tunisia and said it was a miracle he survived.
The attack on Friday in the resort of Sousse, 93 miles (150km) south of Tunis on the country’s east coast, left at least 38 people dead and 36 injured, including at least five British tourists and an Irishwoman named as Lorna Carty.
Tom, a 22-year-old graduate arrived in the hotel only the day before with his mother, Sam, and 16-year-old younger brother Calum.
Tom and Sam were near the outdoor pool shortly before midday when they heard gunfire on the beach. “I heard the first shots, I didn’t know what it was. Then I heard it again, and I told mum let’s run.”
He and his mother sprinted up the marble steps through the glass doors at the back of the hotel into the big central atrium as gunfire and screaming rang out behind them. They raced across the marble-floored lobby and turned right to the long wooden reception desk, then spied a door at the far end. Tunisian staff were by the door shouting for them to come. “The hotel staff said ‘this way’,” said Tom, a civil engineering graduate from Leeds University.
The scene outside the Imperial Marhaba hotel near the Tunisian resort town of Sousse. At least five British tourists and one Irish woman were reported dead. Photograph: Chris Stephen for the Guardian
“Inside, they led us up some stairs to a corridor where there were offices. People were coming out saying ‘what are you doing up here?’ ”
They found about 20 people in the corridor, confused and frightened. Then a gunman came up the stairs after them and opened fire, killing two tourists standing by the stairs. “He shot two people, through the head,” said Tom.
Then Tom found himself face to face with the gunman, who was pointing a Kalashnikov assault rifle at him. “He looked right at me – I thought I was dead,” said Tom. “He was maybe 20 or 25, he had long black hair and a beard.”
Then the gunman squeezed the trigger, and there was the shattering sound of bullets. The shots hit the marble floor, spraying Tom and his mother with shards of marble, wounding her in the ankle and catching Tom in the wrist.
“I don’t know why he stopped. He could have killed everybody,” said Tom, from Cheshire. His mother spied a toilet door opposite them and threw herself in, with Tom following. Inside, they rushed to a cubicle and slammed the door. “It wasn’t much protection, the cubicle door wouldn’t have stopped him,” said Sam. Inside the cubicle, Tom unrolled toilet tissue to dress first his mother’s ankle wound, and then his wrist.
Then they heard sobbing from the next cubicle. “There was a girl in there, maybe 25, she was badly wounded. She needed help, she was crying and she was all alone,” he said. He called for her to squeeze into their cubicle and she hobbled in, bleeding heavily from a marble fragment that was embedded in her thigh.
Tom had no medical training, but decided it was vital to pull it out. “She had a big chunk of the [marble] tile in her leg. I just said ‘I’m going to have to pull this out.’” After removing the fragment from her leg, Tom used the remaining toilet roll to wrap around her wound. “I looked in the cubicle she had been in, there was just blood everywhere, she was badly wounded.”
The three of them stayed in the cubicle, not daring to talk or move. “I was expecting him to fire through the door and spray everybody,” said Tom.
Beyond the bathroom they could hear more shooting and the screams of the wounded. Sam said: “People were out in the corridor, we could hear them, shouting ‘I’m dying’ but we couldn’t step out to see.”
They stayed in the toilet for an hour, before soldiers arrived, led by an officer they described as “brilliant” for calming people down. “This army guy was brilliant, he put people at their ease,” said Tom. “Then there were just army people everywhere.”
They were taken to hospital, and then reunited with Tom’s younger brother, Calum, who had been upstairs in his room watching TV when the shooting started. He went to the window, to see a gunman rushing into the hotel, but other tourists told him to stay on the upper floors. Amid praise for the staff, many were critical of the lack of security at the hotel, which had no armed officers on duty, despite the massacre at the Bardot museum in March and a string of battles between jihadists and security forces. “There was no security before,” said Sam. “I’ve been to Turkey, to Egypt, those countries have security,” she said.
For Tunisia, the impact of the attack may be devastating. Fears were voiced after the Bardot attack that tourism, which employs 470,000 people, would be hit hard, but officials had hoped the museum attack would prove an isolated incident.
More than 420,000 British tourists visited Tunisia last year, and with the economy depressed, the country had been hoping that numbers would continue this year. Now many fear there will be mass cancellations.
Awaiting one of the evacuation flights due to leave for Manchester in the early hours of the morning, Tom said he is amazed he and his mother are still alive. “I just don’t know why he [the gunman] stopped, he could have killed everybody.”