TUNISIA: A police officer on Tuesday shot and killed two persons making an annual pilgrimage to a renowned Tunisian synagogue as well as two members of the security forces before he was killed, according to the interior ministry.
According to the ministry, four other visitors to the Ghriba synagogue on Djerba island and five more security officers were wounded in the attack.
The two worshippers slain were named in a statement by the Tunisian foreign ministry as a Tunisian, 30, and a French person, 42, but the victims’ names were withheld, according to AFP.
According to the interior ministry, the attacker first killed a coworker and seized his ammunition before the attack. Then, as the yearly journey ended on Tuesday night, he proceeded to the Ghriba synagogue, the oldest in Africa. In 2002, a suicide truck bomber assaulted the temple, killing 21 people.
The interior ministry declined to call the shooting a terrorist attack, instead saying that investigations were “continuing to shed light on the motivations for this cowardly aggression.”
Matthew Miller, a spokesman for the US State Department, denounced the shooting. The attack in Tunisia, which coincided with the annual Jewish pilgrimage that brings believers to the El Ghriba Synagogue from all over the world, is regrettable, he wrote on Twitter.
“We offer our condolences to the people of Tunisia and applaud the swift response of Tunisian security forces.” Following the attack, the French embassy in Tunisia declared that it had established a “crisis unit” and an emergency hotline.
According to local media, the hundreds of pilgrims became frightened after hearing gunfire at the synagogue. The pilgrimage to Ghriba, suspended for two years due to the pandemic, was restarted in 2022, and organisers report that over 5,000 Jewish faithful, mainly from abroad, took part.
– Heart of tradition –
The pilgrimage to Ghriba, which falls between Passover and Shavuot, is central to Jewish ritual in Tunisia, which now only has 1,500 Jews living there (mainly in Djerba), down from 100,000 before the country’s 1956 independence. Although their numbers have decreased after the bombing in 2002, pilgrims still come from Europe, the United States, and Israel to participate.
The shooting on Tuesday occurred just as Tunisia’s tourism sector was beginning to recover from its pandemic-era lows and from the fallout from two attacks in 2015 that claimed dozens of foreign tourists’ lives in Tunis and Sousse.
Following the 2011 overthrow of ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali by the Arab Spring, Islamist militancy exploded in Tunisia. The war against terrorism has allegedly advanced significantly in recent years, according to the authorities.
The Ghriba incident occurred while Tunisia was experiencing a terrible financial crisis that has worsened since President Kais Saied seized power in July 2021 and rushed through a constitution that gave his office unrestricted authority and rendered parliament useless.
