LONDON // Millions of people across Britain held a minute’s silence on Friday, a week after an extremist gun massacre in Tunisia that killed 38 people, including 30 Britons.
A special ceremony was also held at the scene of the killings on a beach near Sousse, with dozens of officials and tourists in attendance as Tunisia stepped up security at its holiday resorts.
In the UK, flags flew at half-mast as schools, government offices and the Wimbledon tennis tournament fell silent at midday to honour the victims of the worst terror attack on Britons since the 2005 London bombings.
Employees of travel group TUI, which includes operators Thomson and First Choice that organised the holidays of all of the British victims, stood in silence outside the company’s headquarters.
There was also a ceremony outside Walsall football stadium in central England in tribute to three local men from the same family who died in the tragedy.
The only surviving family member from the holiday, 16-year-old Owen Richards, observed the silence wearing the club’s red shirt and holding his mother’s hand outside the grounds.
Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip joined in the silence during a visit to Strathclyde University in Glasgow, while prime minister David Cameron marked the moment in his Witney constituency north-west of London.
The profile picture on the prime minister’s Twitter account was changed to a sign reading, “Remember Tunisia”, with the first word written in red.
Britain has launched an investigation into the ISIL-claimed attack. Police said that they had so far taken 275 witness accounts, and that more than 1,200 potential witnesses had returned to Britain.
St Paul’s Cathedral in London joined in the remembrance, while the Muslim Council of Britain urged imams to deliver a sermon of peace at Friday prayers.
At Wimbledon, the start of matches was delayed by 45 minutes to allow spectators and tennis players to take part in the moment of remembrance.
It came as Britain prepares to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the July 7, 2005 attacks in which four suicide bombers killed 52 people on London’s transport network.
Meanwhile, the bodies of 25 of the British victims killed in last Friday’s attack have now been repatriated on a military transport plane to Royal Air Force base Brize Norton.
Eight were brought back to Britain on Friday and the final five will be returned on Saturday.
The remains will be released to the families following post-mortem examinations.
Inquests into each of the 30 deaths will be opened to probe the circumstances of each death.
On Thursday, Tunisia said that eight people had been arrested in connection with the massacre carried out by 23-year-old student Seifeddine Rezgui, who gunned down foreign tourists after pulling a Kalashnikov assault rifle from a beach umbrella.
Three Irish nationals, two Germans, one Belgian, one Portuguese and one Russian were also among the dead.
The massacre was the second ISIL-claimed attack on tourists in Tunisia in three months, after the extremist group said it was behind a March attack on the National Bardo Museum in Tunis that killed 22 people.
Tunisian authorities have said that Rezgui received weapons training from extremists in neighbouring Libya, travelling to the chaos-wracked country at the same time as the two young Tunisians behind the Bardo attack.
In the past four years, dozens of police and soldiers have been killed in Tunisia in clashes and ambushes attributed to jihadists – mainly in the western Chaambi Mountains.
Disillusionment and social exclusion have fuelled radicalism among young Tunisians, with the country exporting some 3,000 extremist fighters to Iraq, Syria and Libya.
* Agence France-Presse