TUI travel agents told clients Sousse was 100% safe, inquest hears

Holidaymakers caught up in the terror attack in Sousse had been assured by TUI before they travelled that Tunisia was ‘100% safe’, the inquest into the deaths of the 30 British victims heard today.

Andrew Ritchie QC, representing families of 20 of those gunned down at the Imperial Marhaba Hotel, told the hearing that two of the survivors, Paul Thompson and his daughter, had visited a TUI branch before their holiday and raised concerns about security in Tunisia following an earlier terrorist attack on the Bardo national museum in the capital, Tunis.

The pair were told that Tunisia was ‘100% safe’, he told the Royal Court of Justice. Ritchie also said that Cheryl Stollery, whose husband, John, was killed in the Sousse attack, claimed TUI agents didn’t show her Foreign Office travel advice warning of the risk of a terror attack when she booked her holiday.

Foreign & Commonwealth Office director of Middle East and North Africa Jane Marriott told the inquest that as part of a scheme between the FCO and tour operators, called Know Before You Go, travel agents would be expected to promote the travel advice.

Travel firms were also expected to display a ‘prominent Know Before You Go’ logo and link to the travel advice on their websites, she said.

When asked by Ritchie whether the claims by Stollery and Thompson make her feel ‘comfortable’, Marriott said: "We would expect our partners to fulfil that requirement [to promote the advice]."

Just the day before the Sousse terror attack, the FCO had met with UK government officials and the embassy in Tunis to discuss security issues in Tunisia, the hearing heard.

During the meeting, they had discussed ‘reaching out’ to tour operators to ensure they brought travel advice to customers’ attention.

However, at a cross-Whitehall meeting held 12 days after the Bardo museum attack it was decided that the travel advice would not be tightened to advise against all but essential travel.

Marriott told the inquest that in order to change the advice to all but essential travel, the terrorist threat had to be ‘specific, large and endemic’.

She said: "We didn’t have anything to indicate the threshold had been met. The Bardo attack was clearly something different. It fitted a rising picture, but at the time we were at the start of what would become a rising trend."

However, the inquest also heard that an unnamed British embassy official in Tunisia had warned the government in a report written months before the Sousse killings that security at hotels in the resort could not prevent a terror attack.

The official, who was in Mumbai, India, at the time of the 2008 terrorist massacre, conducted a recce of nine beachfront hotels in Sousse, including the Imperial Marhaba and nearby Port El Kantaoui, between January and March 2015.

Reading extracts from the heavily redacted report, Ritchie said: "It said ‘despite some good security infrastructure around the hotels and resorts there seems to be little in the way of effective security to prevent or respond to an attack’."

Ritchie told the inquest the government was also aware that Islamic State-linked extremists had warned that the terror group would target tourists in a video posted on YouTube in December 2014.

TUI will give evidence later in the hearing, which is expected to last seven weeks.