New details emerge about Tunisia gunman's past

The Tunisian jihadist behind last month's massacre of foreigners at a seaside resort had previously worked in tourism, officials said yesterday, as his mother insisted the young man was "brainwashed".

In an interview yesterday, Prime Minister Habib Essid revealed more details about 23-year-old Seifeddine Rezgui, who gunned down 38 foreign tourists in the June 26 attack.

"We know he was a member of a dance club and was familiar with the tourism sector, having worked in it as an events organiser," Essid told the French-language newspaper La Presse.

Tourists fled in horror as Rezgui pulled a Kalashnikov assault rifle from inside a furled beach umbrella and went on a shooting spree outside a five-star hotel.

The attack at Port El Kantaoui, north of Sousse, killed 30 Britons, three Irish nationals, two Germans, one Belgian, one Portuguese and a Russian.

Rezgui was shot dead by police.

Both the authorities and relatives later described him as having been an apparently normal young man who had been keen on breakdancing.

His mother Radhia Manai, 49, told Britain's Sunday Times her son must have been "brainwashed" by extremists as previously he would not have hurt a mouse.

"When they told me my son had killed all these people I said no, it's impossible," she said.

"I can't believe it. Once there was a mouse in the house and I asked Seifeddine to kill it and he refused saying, 'I can't kill anything.'

"God bless the victims, all those people and their poor families, and I feel so sorry but I want to tell them it wasn't my son who did this, it was another Seifeddine," she said.

She said he was "a victim like all the others".

A resident near where his parents live in the town of Gaafour had previously told AFP that Rezgui worked "in tourism in the area of Kantaoui", where the attack is thought to have been planned, although there had been no confirmation of this from another source.

The attack on the beach and around the swimming pools of the Riu Imperial Marhaba Hotel was claimed by the Islamic State group.