What Are the FCO Playing At.

As you may have heard a terrorist attack took place in Sousse, Tunisia on Friday (26/6/15). We know that 38 people were killed in this attack. We also know that 15 of those people were British citizens. However the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) is still unable to announce publicly whether any of the other 23 dead were British citizens. What is worse is that I get the impression they're not even able to tell the families whether or not their loved one have been killed.

Obviously in a situation like this it can be difficult identifying the dead. After all if you've got a body in a morgue with no driving license, bank card or crying relative near-by to tell you who they are it's almost impossible to know where to start to look. However three days later the hotels and tour operators must be well aware of who has failed to return to their hotel rooms even to collect their belongings.

If you were to search those empty hotel rooms you would quite quickly find passports including the persons details including a photograph. If the passport was issued after 2006 - as is likely with passports only being valid for 10 years - it will also include a microchip containing biometric information about the passport holder including their fingerprints. With even Nigeria using wireless fingerprint scanners in their recent election and FCO staff with access to the database on the ground it really shouldn't be that difficult to identify even disfigured bodies.

As such I'm beginning to worry that maybe Britain is deliberately delaying the process in order to keep the story running until the upcoming 10th anniversary of the 7/7/05 terror attacks. The idea being to spread fear as widely as possible to justify support for the Extremism Bill and the Investigatory Powers Bill  which were introduced in the recent Queen's speech.

These bills are controversial because it is quite clear that the UK government isn't using the powers already at it's disposal to tackle Islamic terrorism. For example they could already shut down organisations like Cage UK and individuals who facilitate people travelling to join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). They could also strip those who do join ISIL of their citizenship.

Mind you if the FCO were even halfway competent then they wouldn't have spent the last 5 years recruiting tens of thousands of young Muslims first to overthrow the Libyan government and then to try and overthrow the Syrian government.

16:10 on 29/6/15 (UK date).