I was held at gunpoint by police on holiday when they mistook me for a cigarette smuggler

A British tourist has told of the hell he endured on holiday after being arrested in Tunisia after bungling officers mistook him for a convicted cigarette dealer.

James Colley, 57, better known as Jim, left with his wife Louise Colley, 51, on August 2 for a package holiday to the North African country to celebrate his retirement.

However, upon arrival at Enfidha-Hammamet International Airport, he was questioned by armed police officers and then asked to report to court in the capital, Tunis.

Jim was stunned and later discovered that the police were actually looking for a man named James Coyle, who had been summarily convicted in 2012 for smuggling cigarettes into the country.

The panicked couple spent the rest of their holiday battling the astonishing accusations.

They had to spend another £800 on three eight-hour return journeys to Tunis and on lawyers’ fees.

When Jim finally appeared in court on the last day of their “vacation,” the case against him was dropped within seconds because the charges were “too old.”

Speaking about his ordeal, father-of-three Jim said: “We still don’t know if it was a money-making scam. Were the police involved? The passport people?

“I’m a pretty calm person, but honestly, you don’t argue with someone with a gun, do you? You have no idea – are they pulling the trigger? It was absolutely terrifying.

‘I’ve never had any mental health issues in my life, but to be honest, this was very mentally taxing.’

Louise, a community nurse who supported Jim during their ‘holiday from hell’, has now warned Britons not to travel to Tunisia.

She said: ‘Don’t go. It sounds awful because there are some nice people there, but it’s just not safe – I just don’t think it’s safe for any British tourist to go at the moment.

“It could have been our children. They could have been on holiday and it could have happened to them. They might not have been able to cope with it as well as we did.

“We didn’t know if Jim was going to get locked up or what the hell was going to happen.”

“It was really scary. It should never have happened. I don’t know why we were bullied. It’s total corruption there.”

The couple from Newcastle booked their week-long holiday after Jim retired from working at a Nissan car factory earlier this year.

They paid £1,400 to stay at the five-star El Mouradi Hotel in Mahdia.

But they never got to enjoy the facilities after Jim was stopped by police at the airport and interrogated for about four hours.

He said: ‘They kept taking my passport away and asking us the same two questions: Had I been to Tunisia before and where had I worked?

“I said I’d only been on my honeymoon once, in 2009.” They didn’t believe us, they said, “You’ve been before.”

‘They had guns, and you don’t argue with someone with a gun.

‘Then they brought in an interpreter, and he basically said, ‘You’re being summoned to appear in court.’

Jim and Louise arrived at their hotel in the early hours of August 3, after being charged £95 for a local taxi fare.

At 4am on August 5, they paid a local man to drive them in an old VW Polo for four hours along the Trans-African Highway to Tunis, where they were to appear in court.

James recalled that the building looked like a “1960s bank” with “piles of paper files everywhere” and all the staff smoking.

Upon arrival he was handed a court document, which strangely enough incorrectly referred to him as ‘James Coyle’.

Jim added: ‘In this court they said, ‘English?’ I said yes. And then they said, ‘You have to sign this’… But it had the wrong name on it.

“They took us into another room, and there was a man of great prestige, and he said, ‘So you’re innocent?’ I thought that would be the end of it.

“But he said, ‘You have to come to the police station tomorrow to hand in this form.’ I said, ‘Where is the police station?’ It was in Tunis again.”

The couple went to the ‘simmering’ local police station the next day, where James was told he had to appear in court on August 8.

A local English-speaking lawyer they approached initially said she could represent them in court for £530.

However, they later hired another lawyer for £130, after tipping a bailiff for their help, and appeared before a panel of judges.

Jim added: ‘I was in the public gallery. There were three judges.

‘The doors opened on the side and they started dragging prisoners out of the jail in handcuffs.

“Our driver came to interpret for us and said, ‘That man, he tried to have sex with a woman when she didn’t want it, this man beat up his mother.’

‘I was the last one, even though we had paid the doorman to let us in first.

‘I had to stand with my hands behind my back, my head bowed in front of these three judges. There were police officers with their guns.

“I was called, so I stood up and the lawyers stood up too.”

An anxious Jim said he wasn’t sure which way the case would go and was very concerned about being fined or going to jail.

But within 30 seconds, he said, one of the judges “waved his hand in the air” and an emcee came over and whispered, “It’s over, you can go.”

The stunned couple were later told by their hastily assembled team of lawyers that the case should never have been pursued due to the age of the offence.

Jim said: ‘They actually knew all along that it was cigarette smuggling in 2012. This James Coyle was convicted in absentia.

‘Because the case was already more than five years old, it was dismissed anyway. Not because it wasn’t me, but because there was a case of mistaken identity.’

The Tunisian embassy in London has been contacted for comment.