The Tunisian town of Jendouba, near the Algerian border and nestled under the Chaambi Mountains, doesn’t see a lot of Western tourists this time of year. So when two white American men stepped off a collective taxi coming from the capital, Tunis, the afternoon of Oct. 23, people were naturally curious — though no one immediately thought they might be terrorists.
The men, identified by police as Nathan Wells Lawwill, 32, and Patrick Alan Lawwill, 31, from Lansing, Michigan, arrived in Tunis from the United States over a year ago. The brothers told residents and police that they were in Jendouba to enroll in graduate-level computer science courses. According to Abdelatif Ayadi, the police chief of nearby Ezzahwa, local police first kept an eye on the men as a precautionary measure for the visitors’ safety.
