Tunisia attack: police on alert amid fears UK toll will hit 30

The number of Britons killed in Friday’s beach massacre in Tunisia is now expected to pass 30, it has emerged, as hundreds of British police were deployed in one of the biggest counter-terror operations since the London bombings on 7 July 2005.

Informed sources said the eventual death toll could be even higher. So far only 15 Britons have been confirmed among the 38 dead in a process overseen by a British coroner whose job has been complicated because of the nature and location of the attack, and the numbers involved.

The assault is already the biggest loss of British life to terrorism since the 2005 London bombings in which a total of 56 people including the attackers were killed.

Almost 400 officers were at UK airports over the weekend to speak to potential witnesses returning from the scene of the attack in the resort city of Sousse.

Meanwhile 16 Metropolitan police detectives, forensic science specialists and family liaison officers arrived in Tunisia. More will join them to assist the investigation and prevent further attacks. Tunisian investigators said last night they were seeking one or more accomplices to the 23-year-old killer, Seifeddine Rezgui, who was shot dead by police after his assault on the Imperial Marhaba hotel. They have questioned the Tunisian student’s father and three roommates where Rezgui was studying in Kairouan.

Mohamed Ali Aroui, an interior ministry spokesman, told the Associated Press they were “sure that others helped but did not participate” except indirectly.

Meanwhile, video footage emerged apparently showing Rezgui running in from the beach shortly after the attack.

Speaking after a meeting of the UK government’s Cobra emergency planning committee in London, the home secretary, Theresa May, said an expanded British security team in Tunisia would “look at protective security arrangements around tourist resorts” as the Foreign Office warned further attacks in Tunisia remained a possibility.

Scotland Yard said it was tightening security and protection at Wimbledon and other “key sites, business and public places around the UK to help ensure they are safe for visitors and workers”.

The Met police’s assistant commissioner Mark Rowley said: “The national policing response to the attack in Tunisia is likely to be one of the largest counter-terrorism deployments seen since July 2005.”

As more of the British dead were named yesterday, 60 police family liaison officers were deployed in the UK to be with relatives of those killed and injured.

Three generations of the same family were named among the dead yesterday. A 19-year-old student, Joel Richards, his uncle, Adrian Evans, 49, a gas services manager from Tipton in the West Midlands, and his grandfather all died in the attack. Also confirmed dead were: Carly Lovett, 24, a photographer and beauty blogger from Gainsborough, Lincolnshire; Sue Davey and Scott Chalkley, a couple in their 40s from Staffordshire; and Lisa Burbridge from Whickham, Gateshead.

Trudy Jones, from Blackwood in Gwent, south Wales, was named by her local MP, Chris Evans. Jim and Ann McQuire from Cumbernauld, North Lanarkshire, and Bruce Wilkinson, 72, from Goole, East Yorkshire, were also killed.

The Foreign Office has urged travellers to Tunisia to be “especially vigilant”. It said: “Further terrorist attacks in Tunisia, including in tourist resorts, are possible, including by individuals unknown to the authorities and whose actions are inspired by terrorist groups via social media.”

The Tunisian authorities have deployed 1,000 extra police and military to guard beaches and resort hotels but the UK’s former counter-terrorism chief said emboldened jihadis were plotting to kill westerners anywhere in the world, and that stopping them accessing public areas such as beaches was near-impossible.

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Peter Clarke, who was in charge of Scotland Yard’s response to the 7/7 London bombings, said of terrorists’ targets: “It’s everything from government installations, to nightclubs to the energy sector, to holiday destinations. The common theme is to kill as many people as possible. How do you protect a coastline? There is going to be vulnerability, that is just a fact of life.”

In the UK, Scotland Yard said security would be more stringent and more visible at Wimbledon than last year, when the overall terror threat in the UK was “substantial” rather than “severe”, the second highest level, as it is now.

Extra officers will be on patrol at the event, which attracts as many as 40,000 spectators a day. Some roads will be closed and “a highly mobile reserve” will be on call to “respond to emerging incidents”, a spokesman said. Officers will be working in uniform and in plain clothes.

After security was tightened at the Pride march in London and the Armed Forces Day parade on Saturday, Rowley said: “It is right that we keep our security plans under continual review to help protect and reassure the public. There has been a significant increase in the level of counter-terrorist policing activity in the UK. Last year, there were over 330 arrests – about one a day – and 89 people were convicted for terror-related offences.”

Amid the increasing tensions over the threat posed to Britons by Islamic State, the former head of the British army Lord Dannatt said the west should take the fight to the extremist group on the ground, in their heartlands. “We have got to do much more to support those in the region who are fighting Islamist extremists on the ground,” he told BBC1’s Sunday Politics.

“Yes, we can support them from the air, we should be doing more of that, but we should be doing more to support them on the ground as well. More training teams, better equipment and really giving those who are willing to fight the best chance of succeeding, because to succeed on the ground is the really important thing to do.”

Security services across the west were alarmed throughout 2014 by the growth in the potency of Isis, and its ability to attract western youngsters to its cause. They point out that al-Qaida still poses a big threat.

In August 2014, the UK terrorist level was raised to its second highest level of “severe”, meaning a terrorist attack is highly likely. May said the heightened alert was “related to developments in Syria and Iraq, where terrorist groups are planning attacks against the west”.

Attacks in Sydney, New York and Ottawa in late 2014, then Paris in January 2015, demonstrated terrorists had the ability to strike on western soil, with attacks ranging from assailants acting alone to sophisticated group operations.

The danger from so called leaderless jihad, where propaganda incites “lone wolves”, has added to the threat from more directed plots. The Islamist terror threat has twice claimed lives on Britain’s streets in recent years in the 77/attacks while the soldier Lee Rigby was killed near the Woolwich military barracks, south London, in May 2013 by Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowlale.

David Cameron, writing in Monday’s Daily Telegraph, said the government would counter the threat posed by Islamist extremists with a “full-spectrum response” and that it was important to show “unshakeable resolve” in the face of terror.