FOUR Brit pals ran for their lives as the gunman laughed and sprayed bullets at them.
Stacey Dent and boyfriend Dan Horton, both 19, raced down a road and hid in a shop toilet while the killer circled outside.
Becky Catterick, 19, and boyfriend Mark Barlow, 24, also crammed into the metre-square concrete loo as the store shook from gunfire and grenade blasts.
Becky said: “He chased us down the road laughing. He was firing shots but hitting other people behind us.
“If we had been 20 seconds slower we would be gone, shot in the back.
“For that half an hour of solid gunfire when we were trapped in the toilet I thought we’d had it.
“I still don’t know how we weren’t hit. We’re the luckiest people alive.”
The pals also said , 23, wore a bomb belt during the massacre.
They and 15 other tourists hid for two hours before Rezgui was shot dead in the street by security forces.
Roofer Mark added: “We thought we were going to have the best day ever. It turned into the worst.”
The four were on their first holiday together. They had been partying on an inflatable banana boat moments before the bloodshed erupted.
Wearing bikinis and swim shorts they huddled into a wooden shack to look at pictures of themselves on the ride.
Rezgui, wielding an AK-47 automatic weapon, opened fire nearby.
Air conditioning engineer Dan, from Lancaster, said: “Before the pictures had time to load up we heard gunfire.
“The men told us to stay in that hut and lay down, they closed the hatch.
“When they gave the all-clear we ran to the private hotel bar and waited five minutes.
“Suddenly they came in and shouted, ‘Get out. Run.’ A group of people pegged it down a 100-metre stretch of road.
“Just as some were getting near the top the people there shouted, ‘Get in now.’ People were dragging people into shops.”
Mark added: “We saw him just as we got in the shop. He was coming up the road.”
Stacey said: “He walked around the corner, about 80 metres away.
“He looked like a normal tourist, a normal tourist with a gun.”
The shopkeeper bundled everyone in before pulling shut security gates and locking all doors.
Becky, a business administrator from Scunthorpe, said: “We ran to the back of the shop and piled in (to the toilet).
“On one side there was us four and a girl. On the other side was a family with a 14-year-old girl plus a Belgian couple.
“Seconds later the gunman went past. You could hear grenades hitting the wall behind us. There were explosions, vibrations of the gunfire.
“It wasn’t just sounds, you could feel it. It was horrible.
“We were there for an hour, crying, holding each other, crouched down. Nothing was said in the toilet, we were keeping as quiet as we could, straining to hear.”
Stacey said: “I was thinking it was the end. We all thought about our mums, our families, whether we would see them again.”
Outside Rezgui was making his final stand against security forces.
After the gunfire had died down the shopkeeper coaxed them from the hideaway.
Rezgui was dead in the road ten metres away and bodies littered the streets.
For half an hour security forces scoured the area for hidden bombs.
The Brits said a bomb disposal expert in a protective suit then carried out a controlled explosion.
Becky said the expert described it as a “belt bomb”. It is unclear if it was a suicide bomb or a belt of grenades.
Dan added: “I’m traumatised. We are the luckiest people alive”. Stacey added: “We haven’t eaten or slept.”
The youngsters forked out £400 each to stay at the Soviva resort. Yesterday they jetted home with hundreds of others.
Meanwhile another couple told how they cheated death.
Christine Callaghan, 61, said she would have been killed by a bullet to the stomach if it had not bounced off a glasses case in her bag.
She said in hospital: “I had been clutching my beach bag against my middle. Inside were my glasses in a hard case.
“The bullet must have ricocheted off the case, otherwise it would’ve hit my stomach. My glasses are all bent now.”
Healthcare worker Christine suffered a thigh wound but still tried to help a seriously wounded British woman lying in a hotel corridor.
She said: “A lady called Shirley was lying on her front in a pool of blood. She had been shot four times.
“I held her and prayed while her husband Joe tied a tourniquet.
“We were shouting for help for half an hour before anyone came.”
Christine’s husband Tony, 63, a former RAF mechanic from North Walsham, Norfolk, had told his wife to run while he escorted elderly people from a swimming pool to the Imperial Marhaba Hotel.
Tony said: ‘It was absolutely terrifying.
“It was like the click of a finger whether you lived or died.
“There were elderly people walking round in a daze.
“I couldn’t just leave them. So I just did what I could. But I was frightened too.”
He was in our hotel throwing grenades
By NICK PARKER
A COUPLE told how the terrorist threw hand grenades at them.
Rebecca Smith and Ross Thompson fled with other tourist Brits into the Imperial Marhaba Hotel when the shooting started on the beach.
Ross, 21, said: “We could hear him coming up the stairs. He started firing down the corridor. We tried to escape but he caught us.
“We were trapped in the corridor, and then he started lobbing these home-made bombs at us.
“He was shooting at people too. There were three people killed. I thought it was game over. I was shot in the toe.”
Office administrator Rebecca, 22, added: “We got separated. The corridor just exploded and it was chaos. I didn’t know if Ross was dead or alive.
“I locked myself in a toilet with a British woman and her 16-year-old son.
“I was peppered with grenade shrapnel. With one hit, I thought my jaw had come off.”
The couple from Coventry are recovering in hospital.