Until a few shattering moments shortly before midday on Friday 26 June, Karim Sahloul’s life had been pretty good. Aged 38, he worked at the reception desk at the Palm Marina, one of a cluster of luxury hotels at the northern end of the Tunisian resort of Sousse.
Sahloul was born just a stone’s throw away, in the picturesque Port El Kantaoui, and as he grew up he had watched hotel construction eat its way up from Sousse to envelop the port, bringing prosperity with it. Trained in information technology, he had worked for 11 years at the Palm Marina, throughout the 2010 Arab Spring revolution that toppled dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, bringing democracy but also chaos and upheaval to Tunisia.
Then in March two suicide gunmen rampaged through the capital’s Bardo museum, slaughtering 23 people. Sousse held its breath, fearing the attack would sweep away the tourists. But summer kicked in and the coaches arrived once again. “Life was very good, life was very nice, we had a lot of guests,” says Sahloul. “A lot of the British people come back year after year.”
They are not likely, however, to do so next year. On 26 June, a serene day of sunshine, blue skies, tourists lounging by the pool, the picture changed in an instant. Suddenly, Sahloul remembers, “everybody was running in from the beach, waving arms, shouting”.
A thick wall of glass behind the Palm Marina’s reception desk blocked the sound of screams and shooting. On the beach, gunman Seifeddine Rezgui was mowing down tourists with a Kalashnikov.
Sahloul stood transfixed, the scene unfolding like a silent movie in front of him. He bolted out from behind the desk, through the lobby, down a set of steps and outside, arriving into bedlam. Panicking tourists rushed past. The air was filled with the staccato hammer of gunfire.
Sahloul struggled through the panicking throng to the beach. To his left, outside the Imperial Marhaba hotel, dead and dying tourists were lying amid bloody overturned sun loungers. Pounding across the sand, he found Allison Heathcote, a British woman from Felixstowe who had come to Sousse for her 30th wedding anniversary.
Using his first aid training, and common sense, Karim cleared Heathcote’s airway and kept her talking, determined she would not pass out. He found a discarded water bottle and used beach towels to staunch the blood. She survived, despite suffering five bullet wounds, and became known as a “miracle patient”. Her husband, Phil, was killed in the massacre, along with 37 others, 29 of them also British.
The rest of the day is now a blur in Sahloul’s memory; he recalls shouting for people to clear a path for the ambulance crew. Then police arrived, bodies were bagged up, and the shock kicked in. It has never truly subsided. For several weeks he had problems sleeping, images of slain tourists seared in his mind.
Then came the second impact. The massacre saw visitors desert Tunisia en masse. Hotels closed, thousands were laid off, and in the months that followed, a depression descended on the former boom town. “Everything in Sousse depends on hotels – shops, taxis, markets – everything,” says Sahloul. “If the tourism disappears, big problem.”
He was luckier than most: getting winter work on the security staff when the Palm Marina closed its doors in September. But like everyone in Sousse, he fears for the future, worried there will be no work if the hotels stay closed next year. The most difficult part of this waiting is that Sahloul feels the shootings have robbed him of his self-reliance.
His maxim had always been: work hard, work well, and you will prosper. But the terror attacks have changed the equation. Now, he feels his future is no longer in his hands, depending instead on upheavals far beyond his control. All he can do is wait and hope. “A lot of families in Sousse, they are crying for everything that happened, for the deaths on the beach, for our future,” he says. “It’s a very hard situation.”
