Naval Guardsman attacks synagogue in Tunisia, 5 killed

A navy guard opened fire near an old synagogue on the island of Djerba off the Tunisian Mediterranean coast, which had previously been targeted by Islamist militants. He killed two visitors and two guards and injured ten other people during an annual Jewish pilgrimage to the synagogue. The Ministry of the Interior said on Wednesday. Another security guard was also killed by the gunman before reaching the synagogue.

The guard, who was stationed at a naval installation on the island, first killed his fellow guard and pocketed his ammunition before heading to the El Ghriba Synagogue in the old Jewish quarter of Djerba, about half an hour away. the ministry said in a statement. He then fired indiscriminately near the synagogue until officers guarding the pilgrimage shot and killed him.

Authorities gave no motive for the shooting, which killed a 42-year-old Frenchman, described by authorities as French-Tunisian, and a 30-year-old Tunisian, according to the Foreign Ministry. But the synagogue, which hosted a celebration of the annual Lag b’Omer festival on Tuesday night, has previously been attacked by Islamist militants, who have also attacked other Tunisian tourist spots.

Tunisia is also in a political and economic crisis. President Kais Saied has reverted the democracy Tunisians had built over the past decade to autocracy as the economy collapses and a growing number of Tunisians are driven to despair.

The statement from the Interior Ministry said that authorities have launched an investigation “to find out the reasons for this insidious and cowardly attack”.

Six officers and four other people were taken to hospital with injuries of varying severity, the statement said. Authorities have not named any of the victims or the shooter. The ministry later said two officers were also killed in the attack.

Djerba, whose palm trees and blue seascapes have long attracted tourists and European retirees, is home to more than 1,000 Jews, one of the last significant Jewish communities in the Middle East outside of Israel. According to local lore, the Jewish settlement arrived there in Roman times and later built a synagogue, El Ghriba – “The Extraordinary” – said to house a sacred gate brought from Jerusalem two millennia ago.

With a population of nearly 5,000 in the 1940s, the community shrank as Djerbian Jews migrated to Israel or France, while more Muslims moved to the area. There were occasional attacks, including an October 1985 incident in which a Tunisian guard supposed to protect the synagogue fired on the congregation, killing four worshipers and a police officer and injuring eleven. But overall, the Jews and Muslims of Djerba have coexisted peacefully.

El Ghriba, where Tuesday’s shooting took place, hosts an annual pilgrimage that draws crowds of Jewish visitors from Europe and Israel, an event the government has encouraged as a tourist attraction for years. Authorities have kept the pilgrimage tight since militants detonated a truck bomb at the synagogue in April 2002, killing 21 Western tourists in an attack for which Al Qaeda claimed responsibility.

On Monday, the day before the attack, newly arrived US ambassador to Tunisia, Joey Hood, said: visited the synagogue along with US envoy for monitoring and combating anti-Semitism, Deborah Lipstadt, the US embassy in Tunis had said on Twitter.

The embassy was the site of one of Tunisia’s last terrorist attacks, which killed a police officer outside the embassy in an explosion in 2020. Islamist militants also killed 60 people, most of them tourists, in separate attacks in the seaside resort of Sousse and at the Bardo museum in Tunis in 2015.

As with those attacks, Tuesday’s shooting could damage the country’s crucial tourism industry, one of its few strengths in an otherwise weak economy. Visitor numbers to Tunisia had just begun to recover last year after more than a decade of blows, including Tunisia’s late 2010 Arab Spring uprising, terrorist attacks and the coronavirus pandemic.