Hero who took 3 bullets for fiancee in Tunisia marries her

Outwardly, it was a copybook country house winter wedding. The day was crisp and clear, a pale sun warmed the frosted landscaped gardens and the bride and groom, swept along by a blast of goodwill from friends and family, radiated sheer delight.

But as Matthew James and Saera Wilson exchanged vows yesterday at an 18th Century manor house near Caerphilly Castle, the occasion was suffused with bittersweet emotion.

Twenty months ago, Matthew, 32 – the hero of the Tunisia beach massacre – was ‘knocking on death’s door’. He says it is ‘a miracle’ that he is alive today and declares himself ‘the luckiest man you’ll ever meet’.

Cut down by three bullets, he used himself as a human shield to save the life of his fiancée as an Islamic State-trained gunman systematically picked off sunbathing holidaymakers in the resort of Sousse. 

In all, as an inquest in London heard in painfully graphic detail last week, Seifeddine Rezgui killed 38 people, 30 of them British.

It was perhaps the shadow of the inquest which impinged most of all on Matthew and Saera’s happy day. In an interview with The Mail on Sunday on the eve of the wedding, Saera, 27, said: ‘It couldn’t have been worse timing because we’re celebrating while all those who have lost loved ones are up there at the inquest.

‘How do I go through the happiest day of my life when they’re all going through that? But at the same time, we have to remember that, for us, the wedding is the start of a new chapter. We have to put the past behind us and move on.’ As he lay bleeding from bullets wounds to his chest, stomach and arm on that June morning in 2015 – ‘feeling sure it was curtains for me’ – Matthew urged Saera to run for her life.

Cut down by three bullets, he used himself as a human shield to save the life of his fiancée as an Islamic State-trained gunman systematically picked off sunbathing holidaymakers in the resort of Sousse

He told her: ‘I love you, babe, tell the kids I love them but go now because they need one of us to look after them and I’m going to die.’

In the end, against incalculable odds, the couple made it back to Britain alive.

When The Mail on Sunday last spoke to them, days after their return and buoyed by the euphoria of survival, Matthew and Saera spoke excitedly of the future.

Sitting in his hospital bed in Cardiff, Matthew was confident of making a full recovery and talked of playing rugby again. 

Yet the months leading up to the wedding didn’t unfold as the couple envisaged. For one thing, Matthew, a gas engineer, has been told he will never recover fully. 

Though mobile, he lives with ‘crippling pain’ in his left leg, due to nerve damage that doctors say is beyond repair.

On top of this have been the residual effects of acute post-traumatic stress disorder. During one deeply disturbing episode, Matthew came close to suicide. ‘I was going to drive my van off a cliff,’ he says.

As time passed, his mental health gradually improved but he still suffers from recurring nightmares. In them, he is tortured by the face of an elderly German tourist, the first victim of the massacre, who died in front of him.

When the couple travel to Florida for a three-week honeymoon, they will take their daughter Tegan, eight, and son Caden, two

‘I see his face all the time,’ he says.

Affable and innately positive, Matthew finds it uncomfortable talking about the trauma he suffered and has to be cajoled by Saera.

Saera, who herself suffered psychological distress and still has weekly counselling, says: ‘Sometimes he wakes in the night and shakes me, saying, “You’ve been shot but you’re going to live”. Or else he says that I’m dead.

‘But a good cry and a cuddle normally sorts it out. And he often won’t allow me to sleep until he nods off because he thinks he will die. So I have to watch him closely.’

Matthew adds: ‘They are panic attacks – I wake up and have to take a big gulp of air because I feel as though I can’t breathe.’

When the couple travel to Florida for a three-week honeymoon, they will take their daughter Tegan, eight, and son Caden, two. Instead of the beach holiday they originally planned, they will hide away in a villa in a gated compound, its only entrance manned by 24-hour armed guards.

‘You need a key card to get in and out,’ says Saera. ‘I know it sounds over the top but that’s the way we want it. Neither of us will be able to relax on a beach again.

‘Before it happened, we were always on the beach. But on the two occasions we have been since – once to Tenby in Pembrokeshire and once to Cornwall – we stayed on the edge, and planned an escape route just in case something did happen. We clock everyone and we’re constantly nervous.

‘Before, we’d have been straight down there, splashing about.’

Affable and innately positive, Matthew finds it uncomfortable talking about the trauma he suffered and has to be cajoled by Saera

Both Matthew and Saera, who live just outside Cardiff, avoid the city centre. ‘It’s paranoia but we particularly avoided Cardiff at Christmas because we thought that was the time a terrorist attack was most likely,’ she says.

Matthew adds: ‘It makes me very nervous being in the city. I’m constantly on alert.’

He recalls working when he thought the city had come under attack from terrorists.

‘I was doing a job on my own in a house and crouched down behind a window when I heard all these loud bangs, ‘ he says.

‘It turned out to be fireworks going off at the Millennium Stadium. I had to ring Saera and she found out what was going on and rang back to reassure me. I was in a right state.’

But his worst experience came last summer, following the death of a close friend in a car accident and another tragedy which left another friend in a coma a few weeks later.

Saera says: ‘He was having a really bad panic attack at the house. He had decided that because he had cheated death and because of what happened to his friends, what he was going through was like a supernatural film he had seen.

RESORT WAS TARGETED MONTHS BEFORE BUT AUTHORITIES HID IT 

By Michael Powell 

Police in Tunisia foiled a terrorist plot to bomb a hotel but then kept the raid secret, months before Seifeddine Rezgui murdered 30 British tourists at the same resort, it has been claimed.

A senior police commander in Sousse told The Mail on Sunday that a series of counter-terror raids were carried out in January 2015, five months before the massacre.

But he said the plot was hushed up by the authorities, to protect the country’s £1 billion tourism trade. His shocking account – confirmed by local people who witnessed the terror raids – comes after a judge opened an inquest into the deaths last week.

Police in Tunisia foiled a terrorist plot to bomb a hotel but then kept the raid secret, months before Seifeddine Rezgui (pictured holding his weapon) murdered 30 British tourists at the same resort, it has been claimed

The police source said four jihadis – members of the Tunisian terror group Ansar al-Sharia which claimed responsibility for the Sousse atrocity – were arrested in the town of Sidi Bou Ali, eight miles from the resort where Rezgui struck. He said: ‘They were planning to plant explosives at a hotel and kill Westerners in the name of jihad. The hotel was in El Kantaoui, the same resort [as the attack].’

According to locals, police found 2kg of plastic explosives, grenades and Kalashnikovs. It is understood the British authorities were not made aware of the plot at the time, but a Foreign Office spokesman declined to comment last night.

This newspaper has agreed to hand over its evidence to the inquest, due to last six weeks.

The months leading up to the wedding didn’t unfold as the couple envisaged. For one thing, Matthew, a gas engineer, has been told he will never recover fully

‘Death had claimed his friends and he felt that the next people to die would be me and the kids. To stop that happening, he decided that he had to die. He was ready to walk out the house and said he was going to drive his van off a cliff.

‘I blocked the back door and his mother was trying to pull him back into the house. I called the counter terrorism unit liaison officer assigned to us and he was round in ten minutes. Once we started talking logically to him, he got it and calmed down.’

Matthew says: ‘I just lost the plot and started thinking this thing was going to make me kill myself or it would kill my family. It sounds absolutely ridiculous now, but at the time it was terrifying. I was taking a lot of morphine for pain, which doesn’t help you think straight.’

The inquests into the death of the British victims at the Royal Courts of Justice heard criticism of the Foreign Office for not telling travellers that terrorists were targeting tourists in Tunisia.

And it transpired that tour operators dismissed increasing security at the beach resort a month before the massacre because they did not want to alarm holidaymakers (see below).

These revelations have stunned Matthew and Saera, who says: ‘I felt physically sick when I heard all this. It’s been really hard. It’s brought it all back. We booked the holiday last minute, so they would have known about the threats.’ Matthew says: ‘If the authorities and the people involved who knew about it had done their jobs properly, they could have saved a lot of lives and a lot of injuries to other people.

‘If anyone had warned me that there had been a terrorist attack in Tunisia a couple of months before we had gone, there is no way we would have booked – 100 per cent.’

 Both Matthew and Saera, who live just outside Cardiff, avoid the city centre. ‘It’s paranoia but we particularly avoided Cardiff at Christmas because we thought that was the time a terrorist attack was most likely,’ she says

A chilling reconstruction video which showed the terrorist’s deadly two-mile journey around the resort was shown to the inquest. Incredibly detailed, it used computer-generated imagery to show where each victim was cut down. Saera felt compelled to watch it over and over again: ‘It was horrible and I burst into tears but I couldn’t stop studying it.’

Matthew has been offered extra medical help for his on-going problems by the surgeon who saved his life in Tunisia. He says: ‘I’m not going back. No way. As much as I would like to thank Dr Younes, I couldn’t go back.’

Meanwhile, he struggles at work. A job that once would take him a day to complete now takes two. ‘I’m still in a lot of pain. I get really bad stabbing pains down my left leg and my right arm is numb.

‘It kept me out of work for about eight months, which isn’t ideal when you run your own business. I couldn’t walk properly. I was on crutches for a while. Even now, I can’t work as hard as I did before because I’m in constant pain. 

‘I’ve even got morphine because it’s that bad, but I try not to use that unless I have to because it is addictive.

‘I’ll quote on a job and put in a day’s labour, but I just can’t finish it in time. If I do a full boiler install, it takes me a week to recover.

But his worst experience came last summer, following the death of a close friend in a car accident and another tragedy which left another friend in a coma a few weeks later

‘I had thought everything would recover fine, but when we went back after some MRI scans, it was a different story.

‘The bullets tracked through the arm, the stomach and the chest – and when I was told the nerve damage in my abdomen would not get any better, I felt really angry.

‘I was told that if they did operate, it could do more damage to my femoral nerve [in the thigh] and I could lose the use of my leg. It’s really painful as it is. Anything can set it off. But, look, I’m still here and there’s many who aren’t so lucky, as the inquest has made plain.

‘I’m determined this isn’t going to beat me and Saera feels the same.’

He added: ‘We’ve had our ups and downs together since it happened but we’ve been through so much, so that’s not surprising.’

Yesterday, the couple’s resilience found expression in the song they chose to accompany their signing of the register after their long-awaited wedding ceremony: Bulletproof, by English synth pop duo La Roux.

And after the ceremony, Saera said: ‘Everyone says they are marrying their best friend on their wedding day, which is true.

‘But I’m also marrying my absolute hero. I was so overjoyed to walk down the aisle.’