My colleague Chris Stephen has this latest dispatch from Sousse:

One couple from Kent told the Guardian they had been relaxing on their sunbeds when they heard what they believed at first to be fireworks, and saw a man running along the sand with what looked like a machine gun.

“He was shouting something, I don’t know what he was shouting,” said Glenn Whitehead, a scaffolder from Swanley, Kent. He shouted at his wife Anita to run, as bullets flew around them. A person lying next to them fell dead, he said.

The couple heard bullets close to their head, and Mrs Whitehead tripped in the sand as others ran screaming beside them. Staff from the hotel’s spa beckoned them inside, where about 20 other tourists and staff were waiting.

The couple said they waited for perhaps 20 minutes before they were led outside by staff, to find bodies lying by the hotel pool and in the foyer, amid pools of blood.

“I looked around the beach and all I could see were dead people covered in towels,” said Mr Whitehead. There was also a body on the sunbed next to the ones they had been using. “Where we were lying were a German mother and daughter. When I got back one of them was covered over, dead.”

“There was a lot of people who couldn’t get off their sunbeds,” his wife said. “They were elderly.”