The dancer leaps into an athletic backwards somersault off a chair, then stumbles as he lands. The camera follows him as he comes back to inspect the broken seat of the chair with a shrug, a light-hearted blooper reel ending to a video of a seriously committed breakdancer.
Five years later, the same man was shown in a very different kind of video: chilling footage of him running along a beach in Sousse shortly after his massacre of more than three dozen foreign tourists.
Eyewitnesses said Seifeddine Rezgui picked out his victims carefully, apparently sparing all Tunisians he came across, including a group of hotel workers who formed a human shield to stop him entering a building next to the one he eventually targeted.
Yet, not long before, the 23-year-old had embraced foreign – and western – influences, from hip hop music to Real Madrid football club, and was a keen breakdancer, as seen in a video that has surfaced on Facebook.
At the start Rezgui is wearing a sweatshirt with the logo This is Me and in comments from when it was first posted, in December 2010, friends pay tribute to his skills. “Very good :)” says a friend called Yassine Kchida. “Bravo seif,” adds Monta Khomsi.
More recent postings are, however, more sombre. “Through this barbaric act,” reads one comment from Ahmed El Hadari, “he has put an end to tourism in Tunisia”.
Rezgui came from a town known as a centre for ultra-conservative Salafists, but had not been considered particularly devout himself. He may have been radicalised as recently as the last six months, one official source said. Family and neighbours in his dusty, impoverished hometown just a few hours northwest of Sousse said they had not spotted any change in the young man.
His family were poor and suffered the loss of a younger son in a freak accident, when he was hit by lightning several years ago, but Rezgui had a university degree that offered hope of a more prosperous life. Security forces said he was not on their watchlist of known potential militants, and although he had taken out a passport in 2013 he had apparently never used it to travel abroad.
Tunisia has provided more foreign jihadis to extremist militant groups, including Isis, than any other country, and there have long been fears that some of the thousands of young men trained and battle-hardened abroad might turn their guns on their own country.
But Rezgui’s apparent lack of foreign travel – unless he crossed borders illegally – raises questions over both how he obtained the weapon, and how he learned to use it to such deadly effect. He was laughing and relaxed during the killing spree, which went on for about half an hour, according to survivors.
The security response was so slow that new footage of the attack shows him running through acres of empty hotel grounds back down to the beach, after his assault, and wandering along the shore before heading back inland, to the road where he was shot and killed.
Investigators are sure the 23-year-old had help planning the attack, but was solely responsible for all deaths on the beach, the interior ministry’s spokesman, Mohamed Ali Aroui said.
Three former roommates from the town of Kairouan where Rezgui studied have been taken in for questioning, along with his parents. Another man who was detained on the day of the killings and assaulted by furious passersby has since been released; authorities say it was a case of mistaken identity.
