‘Enigmatic’ terrorist who slaughtered 38 tourists in Tunisia

The Tunisian television station El-Hiwar Ettounsi called Seifeddine Rezgui, the 23-year-old electronics student who slaughtered 38 foreign tourists last Friday, “the enigmatic terrorist”.

The question posed by El-Hiwar haunts the entire country, as well as the parents of thousands of European youths who have joined Islamic State’s jihad: “How does a university graduate go from being a young man who is succeeding at his studies to being a killer of innocent people?”

According to eyewitness reports, Rezgui was calm and smiling throughout the massacre. When his family received condolences at the weekend, his uncle Ali (71) told Agence France-Presse: “In 23 years he never did anything illegal. He completed his courses. He laughed. He said hello as he walked by. How was he trained? Where was he trained? God only knows. That’s what torments us now.”

One of the gunmen killed who killed 22 people at the Bardo museum in March held a stable job in a travel agency. The fact that radical Islamists are often impossible to distinguish from the population at large makes it difficult to prevent attacks such as the one on Kantawi beach.

Although Rezgui’s passport, issued in 2013, bore no trace of travel, interior minister Najem Gharsalli said yesterday that authorities were investigating the possibility he may have gone to Libya, where Islamic State, al-Qaeda and other factions are fighting each other.

Degree in electronics

Rezgui was from a poor neighbourhood in the northwestern town of Gaafour, where his father is a labourer. Yet he obtained his baccalaureat, completed an undergraduate degree in electronics, and began work on a master’s degree in Kairouan. Because it was the base for the Muslim conquest of north Africa in the 7th century, Kairouan is considered a holy city by Islamists.

There seem to have been two Seifeddine Rezguis. The first was a bright student who loved football and break-dancing and posted his performances on Facebook, along with Enrique Iglesias songs and television skits. In a video from 2010, circulated by Tunisian media, “Seif Sesco” dances wearing a baseball cap and a necklace.

The second Rezgui emerged between two and three years ago. He frequented a Salafist mosque in Kairouan – one of the 80 "out of control" mosques which the government promises to shut down this week – grew a scraggly beard and donned the Islamist khamis, a long tunic that stops above the ankles.

Rezgui’s parents and three flatmates from Kairouan have been arrested by Tunisian authorities. Police confiscated documents from his home. The mobile phone he threw into the sea before opening fire has been retrieved by divers.

“Recently, his friends noticed a kind of strictness. He became more solitary. He was absorbed by the internet and wouldn’t tell his friends what he was surfing on,” said Mohamed al-Aroui, the spokesman for the interior ministry.

Rezgui had no police record and went totally unnoticed by Tunisian security services, despite the fact that he vaunted his jihadist convictions on social media for the past 18 months. Internet activity was closely monitored under the former dictatorship of Zein al-Abidine Ben Ali, but governments that followed the January 2014 “jasmine revolution” stopped internet surveillance.

Picture of armed jihadist

Had they watched Rezgui, Tunisian authorities would have seen a picture of an armed jihadist on his cover page, photographed from the back, with this caption: “If the love of jihad is a crime, the world is my witness that I am a criminal.”

There is speculation that Rezgui chose the Imperial Marhaba Hotel because its owner, Zohra Driss, is the heiress to a hotel chain, a deputy in parliament and a member of the national bureau of the ruling Nidaa Tounes party. Driss denied a rumour that he was for a time employed by the hotel.

The fact that Rezgui attacked a hotel owned by such a prominent member of the ruling class, associated with the former dictatorship, seems to have been prefigured by one of Rezgui's twitter postings: "Heroes in tombs; men in prison; traitors in palaces and thieves in high office: that is the politics of Tunisia, " he wrote.

The most chilling Tweet was posted at 6.40am on the day of the massacre. “Our lone wolves are not like the others,” Rezgui wrote. “Oh infidels of Tuisia, they are soldiers of the Caliphate and I swear by God that this is but the beginning of terror.”

The message was signed with the hashtag “conquest of Sousse”.