problem,” Essid told the BBC in an interview. Police had been “blocked everywhere”, he added.
Essid spoke as Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister David Cameron led a minute’s silence for the victims, 30 of whom were British.
Tourists fled in horror as a Tunisian identified as 23-year-old Seifeddine Rezgui pulled a Kalashnikov assault rifle from inside a beach umbrella and went on a shooting spree outside a five-star hotel.
Three Irish nationals, two Germans, one Belgian, one Portuguese and a Russian were also killed.
On Thursday, Tunisia announced it had arrested eight people, including a woman, “with direct links” to the attack.
Tunisian authorities have said Rezgui received weapons training from jihadists 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 security forces have been killed in Tunisia in clashes and ambushes attributed to jihadists — mainly in the western Chaambi Mountains on the border with Algeria.
Disillusionment and social exclusion as well as economic woes have fuelled radicalism among youths in Tunisia. About 3,000 Tunisians have gone to Iraq, Syria and Libya to join Jihadist ranks. The militant attacks have dealt a heavy blow to the tourism sector which contributes between seven and eight percent of Tunisia’s GDP.
The sector accounts for 400,000 jobs, directly and indirectly, and it is a key source of foreign revenue for a country where the local currency, the dinar, is non-convertible.
The economic impact of the beach bloodbath, on top of the upheaval following the overthrow of Ben Ali, is likely to exceed half a billion dollars for 2015, according to Tourism Minister Selma Elloumi Rekik.
In the wake of the beach attack, Tunisia’s government pledged to boost security around hotels, beaches and attractions.
Kamel Jendoubi, the minister who heads a crisis group set up after the attack, said 1,377 extra armed security officers had been deployed to reinforce police already on the ground.