Tunisian president says security failures helped museum killers

 Tunisian police stand guard at Carthage international airport in Tunis, after security was stepped up. Photograph:

The Tunisian president, Beji Caid Essebsi, said security “failures” facilitated the deadly attack claimed by Isis on the country’s national museum, which killed 20 foreign tourists.

“There were failures” which meant that “the police and intelligence were not systematic enough to ensure the safety of the museum”, Essebsi told the Paris Match weekly in an interview published on Saturday.
Twenty-one people, all but one of them foreign tourists, were killed when two gunmen stormed the National Bardo Museum in the capital Tunis on Wednesday.

Essebsi however stressed that the security forces “responded very effectively to quickly put an end to the attack at the Bardo, certainly preventing dozens more deaths if the terrorists had been able to set off their suicide belts”, he was quoted as saying on the Paris Match website.
The president’s comments came as Tunisian authorities said there were developments in the investigation.

“There are developments in the case, but to protect the secrecy of the investigation we prefer not to provide any details,” prosecution spokesman Sofiene Sliti said.
However, the interior minister, Mohamed Ali Aroui, said “more than 10 people have been arrested for direct or indirect involvement in the attack, among them people who provided logistical support”.

The minister also said, without elaborating, that an arrest warrant had been issued for a Tunisian named Maher Ben Mouldi Kaidi for his suspected involvement in the attack.
On Wednesday, the two gunmen targeted tourists visiting the museum, killing 21 people, including a Tunisian police officer.
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The dead tourists were four Italians, three Japanese, three French, two Spaniards, a Colombian, an Australian-Colombian, a British woman, a Belgian woman, three Poles and a Russian.

Doctor Chadli Dziri, chief of surgery at the Charles Nicolle hospital in Tunis, said that of 43 people wounded there were still concerns about the prognosis for one, a French woman shot in the stomach and the leg.
Dziri said it was clear that many people had been shot as they tried to escape, because they had been hit in the back.
Isis claimed it was behind the attack and threatened more.

Authorities said the gunmen had trained in neighbouring Libya, where Isis is believed to have training camps.
The brother of one of the gunmen, Yassine Laabidi, expressed shock that he was dead, “that he was involved in this; none of us in the family can understand what happened”.

He described Yassine as a “bon vivant” who “enjoyed a drink with mates and would joke around with everyone. He had no complex whatsoever.”
He said Yassine, who had become more of a devout Muslim in recent years, “was brainwashed by swines who send young men to their death in the name of religion”.