Tunisia travel alert: Thousands of Britons fly home

By Frank Gardner, BBC security correspondent

The governments decision to warn all Britons to leave Tunisia was not taken lightly.

But the large number of British investigators sent out there and working alongside their Tunisian counterparts, concluded that the country faced a high threat from an only partially-dismantled terrorist cell.

In other words, that jihadist accomplices of the murderer Seifeddine Rezgui were still at large, probably with access to automatic weapons and possibly searching for more opportunities to kill western tourists. That threat still exists today.

The recent safety precautions by the Tunisians, what the Foreign Office calls the mitigation efforts, while welcomed were not considered enough to meet this threat. Hence the revision to the travel advisory.

But while tourists and expatriates are being brought home, Britain is leaving behind in Tunisia a number of advisors to help the authorities improve their security with the hope that in a few months time, the decision can be reversed and tourists will be free to return to this much-loved holiday destination.

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