Family forced to take refuge in bathroom
By Maurice Garvey
A LUCAN family were forced to hide in a hotel bathroom during the horrific terrorist attack in Tunisia last week.
Marian King (53), her partner Bob Heinzl, her son Cian (18) and daughter Naoise (15), were unsure if they were going to live or die during the attack in Sousse.
The family were on holiday at the Riu Belvue Park Hotel, next door to the Imperial Marhaba Hotel, where the massacre took place.
After returning last Friday, Marian appeared on TV3 show Ireland AM on Monday to recount the terrifying ordeal.
Speaking to Mark Cagney and Sinéad Desmond on Ireland AM, Marian said the family were delayed getting to the beach on the Friday morning.
When they approached the lobby, a women came running towards them shouting “go back to your rooms, my husband has been shot.”
Shortly after, she saw a human stampede coming towards them.
They ran down the corridor, towards the rooms where she and her children ran into a friend’s room, followed by a Tunisian lady and a British couple.
They all hid in the bathroom, cramped together, turned off their phones and tried to stay quiet.
Explaining the terror, Marian said: “We locked ourselves in (the bathroom) for over an hour, I would say and we just stayed really, really quiet because we could hear people in the corridor and we could hear a lot of men’s voices, lots of different languages.”
She continued: “Arabic, I mean, I don’t speak the language but it sounds quite frightening when it’s being spoken really loudly and quickly, so we had no idea.
“We thought that there were gunmen in the corridor and to be truthful, we were expecting them to come through the door.”
The family made friends with Athlone couple Laurence and Martina Hayes, who tragically lost their lives when the gunman, Seifeddine Rezgui (24), opened fire on the beach, killing 38 people and wounding dozens.
