Tunisia weighs new security approach as tourists flee

TUNIS, Tunisia (AP) — Thousands of tourists fled from Tunisia on Saturday after the country's worst terrorist attack killed 38 people — including 15 Britons — as the government struggles to prevent future jihadi attacks against the all-important tourism sector.

New measures to increase the numbers of troops on the streets and crack down on organizations with radical links, however, won't bring the tourists back in the short-term, further threatening the fragile economy.

When a 24-year-old Master's student at Kairouan University strolled on to the Sousse beach and pulled out a Kalashnikov assault rifle and grenades hidden inside his beach umbrella, he was sounding the death knell for Tunisia's 2015 tourist season.

Tourists and employees are returning home with tales of horror cowering in rooms or offices as the killer stalked through the hotel wearing shorts.

Armed men on the beach may well become a more common sight in Tunisia, as Prime Minister Habib Essid announced a raft of new security measures that many have questioned why they weren't implemented after the last horrific attack against tourists in March at the National Bardo Museum that killed 22.

Essid called up the army reserves and said there would now be armed men in the hotels and at tourists sites and he also promised to crack down on unregulated mosques that preached extremist ideas and close down organizations with shadowy funding and extremist links.

The attack came the same day that a suicide bomber killed 27 people in a Shiite mosque in Kuwait and a man in France ran his truck into a warehouse and hung his employer's severed head on the gate.