TUNISIA has insisted that an accident was the most likely cause of an explosion outside a synagogue that killed 10 German tourists and five other people, while German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said he was ”no longer sure” it was a terror attack.
In a change to Germany’s position, Schroeder said he now had doubts that the blast, which occurred amid a wave of anti-Jewish attacks around the world, was deliberate.
German Interior Minister Otto Schily and several German tourists who survived Thursday’s explosion beside the Ghriba synagogue on the resort island of Djerba have said they believed it was a terrorist attack. Israeli officials have described it as an anti-Semitic attack.
”There are signs which speak in favour of an attack, but also information from the Tunisian authorities which make you think the opposite,” Schroeder said on ZDF television Sunday.
He added that he hoped the matter would be cleared up quickly.
If it was an attack he said Germany ”would do everything in its power to catch the people who did it and put them behind bars.”
Tunisia says the blast was caused by a natural gas tanker which went out of control and crashed into the wall surrounding the synagogue, bursting into flames as a group of German tourists visited the site.
Authorities insisted on Sunday it had been an accident.
”The investigations are taking their course, and at this stage in the investigation, nothing justifies anything other than the preliminary conclusions that showed that it was an accidental explosion,” a Tunisian official said.
The official said investigators ”cannot for the moment divulge aspects that are secret in the probe” and needed more time, noting that the truck driver’s body had been burned beyond recognition.
Germany, meanwhile, called on Tunisia to quickly establish the cause of the explosion.
”The Tunisian President Zine El Abdine Ben Ali promised on Saturday during a meeting with the German ambassador, to increase cooperation,” a German foreign ministry representative said on Sunday.
Schily said late on Saturday that evidence was building up that the explosion was an anti-Jewish attack ”aimed at the synagogue and not at the tourists.”
He did not provide details, but said he was in constant touch with Germany’s federal investigation agency, which has sent investigators to the scene.
The incident came amid a rash of attacks on synagogues around the world in apparent retaliation for Israel’s military offensive against Palestinians in the West Bank.
German tourists who survived the explosion also challenged the official Tunisian explanation in interviews published in the German press on Sunday, saying the blast came from a van which had been parked outside the synagogue and not a passing truck.
”I saw the man who carried out the attack,” Helmut Ecker (59) told the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag.
”A van was parked directly in front of the entrance to the synagogue,” he said. ”A man then left from the back and closed the doors, he then quickly headed toward (nearby) houses.”
”It seemed to me a little bizarre. He was perhaps about 30, wearing blue dungarees with paint stains. This was the man who carried out the attack.”
Asked about the official version of an accident put forward by Tunisia, he said: ”It is not possible. There was only a van. It was there just before (the explosion) at the front of the synagogue.”
A fellow tourist, Siegfried Mueller, supported Ecker’s claim. ”This was not an accident,” he told the newspaper.
Journalists were kept away from the scene of the blast until the vehicle involved had been taken away and the site cleared of debris.
The Ghriba synagogue is one of Judaism’s holiest sites and is visited by pilgrims from around the world.
The German foreign ministry on Sunday issued an appeal to Germans travelling to Tunisia to be extra cautious for security reasons.
Meanwhile two more women died in German hospitals Sunday from injuries sustained in the explosion.
But Hamburg police on Sunday denied information from tour operator TUI that that an 18-month-old boy who was injured the blast had died.
TUI also said it is cancelling all excursions to religious sites which might be at risk following the Tunisian blast.
Eight German tourists died earlier along with five other victims described by Tunisian authorities as a Frenchman, two maintenance workers, the driver of the truck and a French-Tunisian tour guide. – AFP
