AN Irish woman on holiday in Tunisia described how she grabbed her two sons and ran after they heard gunfire.
Dubliner Elizabeth O'Brien, who was staying in the resort town of Sousse, heard shots erupting from the Imperial Marhaba hotel early yesterday afternoon.
"I thought it was fireworks and then I thought 'Oh my God' it sounds like gunfire," she told RTÉ.
"I ran to the sea to my children and grabbed our things and, as I was running towards the hotel, the waiters and the security on the beach started shouting 'Run, run, run'.
"We ran to our room, which is like a little bungalow, so we are actually trapped in our room, because we have no contact the phone here doesn't work to call reception.
"The consul from Madrid who is over Tunisia as well said it is a terrorist attack in the hotel next door.
"She told me to stay put, my travel agent said to go to the reception to speak to the rep, but I'm afraid, so I'm stuck here in the room with my two sons not knowing what's going on.
"The agent said the attack was isolated to the hotel next door. The consul told me it was a terrorist attack.
"I just ran as soon as I heard the noise, I don't know what's happening now I'm sort of cut off from the world."
Tomás Ó Ríordáin, from Cúil Aodha in Co Cork but now living in Britain, was in the area at the time of the attack.
He told RTÉ's Raidió na Gaeltachta he was by a hotel pool with his wife Treasa and one of their daughters, Amy, when they heard shots.
“We heard 10 or 15 shots in very quick succession," he said. "Then everyone started running in from the beach towards the hotel and we understood that something was happening.”
He said that others from the hotel were playing volleyball very near to where the gunman was.
“They told us that the attacker came down the street, and directly into the hotel," he said.
"He was dressed all in black, and came in firing all about him. We didn’t see anything, but we heard everything. It was all over 3 or 4 minutes after it started.”
“We were worried about my two daughters, Claire and Siobhán, who were at the beach but we just had to wait and see if they came back. When they returned, we went straight up to the room and closed the windows and the curtains, because they thought at that time that there was a second attacker with a gun so we didn’t know if there was another attacker on the loose. There wasn’t in the end, there was a second man waiting in a getaway car, and he was arrested.”
Mr Ó Ríordáin said last night his hotel had been secured and they were not permitted to go outside.
He expressed his sympathies to the families of all those who had died in the attack.
