Mother of Tunisian gunman says her son was ‘brainwashed’ and would never hurt anyone
London: The mother of the gunman who killed 38 on a Tunisian beach claimed in an interview with Britain’s Sunday Times that her son was a victim of “brainwashing” who previously would not have hurt a mouse.
Tourists fled in horror as a Tunisian identified as 23-year-old Saif Al Deen Rezgui pulled a Kalashnikov assault rifle from inside a beach umbrella and went on a shooting spree outside a five-star hotel.
“When they told me my son had killed all these people I said no, it’s impossible,” Radhia Manai, 49, told The Sunday Times on Saturday.
He killed 30 Britons, three Irish nationals, two Germans, one Belgian, one Portuguese and a Russian.
“I can’t believe it,” his mother added. “Once there was a mouse in the house and I asked Saif Al Deen to kill it and he refused saying, ‘I can’t kill anything.’
“God bless the victims, all those people and their poor families, and I feel so sorry but I want to tell them it wasn’t my son who did this, it was another Saif Al Deen.”
Talking at her home in the farming town of Gaafour, she accused militants of “brainwashing” her son and claimed he too was “a victim like all the others.”
“I want to know who is the head of all this, who did this to him and I want them to go to prison or be killed,” she added.
The gunman’s father Hakim Rezgui told the paper his son liked breakdancing and “talking about football – he liked Real Madrid, Liverpool and Man United.”
