Tunisia attack: RAF prepares to return UK beach victims

Tunisia attack: RAF prepares to return UK beach victims

• 1 July 2015
 
• From the sectionUK

Tunisia beach attack

• Tunisia attack: What we know
• Profile of Tunisia hotel gunman
• Tunisia attack: The British victims
• Tunisia beach attack: The survivors

An RAF plane has left the UK for Tunisia to begin the repatriation of British tourists killed by a gunman at a beach resort last week.

Between five and 10 bodies will be flown into RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire on the C17 transport aircraft, a Whitehall source says.

The process is expected to take several days, with a joint inquest to follow.

Thirty of the 38 victims are thought to be British and all seriously injured UK citizens have now been flown home.

The Tunisian authorities have brought in increased security measures and arrested several people on suspicion of helping the gunman Seifeddine Rezgui.

The 23-year-old student, who had links to the Islamic State jihadist group, was shot dead by police after the killings on the beach in Sousse on 26 June.

Security sources say he is thought to have been trained in Libya at the same time as two men behind the Bardo museum attack in Tunis that left 22 people dead in March.

People have continued to pay their respects at memorials on the beach at Sousse

A single inquest into all the British deaths will be opened by the West London coroner.

Downing Street ruled out an inquiry into the attack, but said Scotland Yard would assist the Tunisian investigation.

A spokesman said the government was "working closely" with victims' families.

A team from the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence and the police is in Tunisia.

Relatives of some of the Britons who died are thought to have been among the people who left flowers and messages at beachside memorials on Tuesday.

Four seriously injured victims were flown back to the UK on a specially modified aircraft on Tuesday

The RAF flew the last four seriously injured Britons back to the UK on Tuesday and they are now in hospital undergoing treatment.

The specially modified plane flew into Birmingham Airport, where Allison Heathcote, 48, from Felixstowe in Suffolk, was taken off and transported to the city's Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

Mrs Heathcote's husband Philip has been confirmed dead, and she has undergone five hours of surgery after suffering multiple gunshot wounds.

A hospital spokesman said Mrs Heathcote remains in a "critical but stable condition, under sedation".

The other injured patients were flown on to RAF Brize Norton, and Downing Street said they were being treated at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, Derriford Hospital in Plymouth and London's St Mary's Hospital.

Tunisia beach attack: The victims

The names of those killed in the attack are slowly emerging. Here's what we know so far about those who lost their lives, as well as those still unaccounted for and the injured.

Some survivors have also been speaking out about their ordeal.

on Wednesday, July 1, 2015