Nice attack: President Hollande to chair crisis talks

French police and soldiers patrol in Nice. Photo: 15 July 2016AP

French police and the army have been patrolling streets in Nice following Thursday's attack

French President Francois Hollande is to chair crisis talks with his inner security cabinet following Thursday's attack in Nice that killed 84 people.

Mr Hollande, who says the attack was a terrorist act, has already extended a state of emergency by three months.

On Thursday, a lorry driver ploughed through a crowd marking Bastille Day on Nice's Promenade des Anglais.

The driver was later shot dead by police. He was identified as Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, 31.

Prosecutors said he had driven the lorry 2km (1.2 miles) along the famous promenade, zigzagging and targeting people.

Ten of the dead were children. Some 202 people were injured; 52 are critical, of whom 25 are on life support.

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At the meeting with the security chiefs, Mr Hollande is expected to review all available options in response to the attack.

In a televised address to the nation on Thursday night, he pledged that army reservists would be called up to help provide security across the country.

A state of emergency was in place across France since November's Paris attacks carried out by militants from the so-called Islamic State group, in which 130 people died. It had been due to end on 26 July.

Mr Hollande said the attack was of "an undeniable terrorist nature".

He warned that the battle against terrorism would be long, as France faced an enemy "that will continue to attack those people and those countries that count liberty as an essential value".

"We will overcome the suffering because we are a united France," he said.

AFP

A reproduction of the residence permit of Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, from French police sources

Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said that no group had admitted carrying out the attack but that it bore the hallmarks of jihadist terrorism.

Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was known to the police as a petty criminal, but was "totally unknown to intelligence services... and was never flagged for signs of radicalisation," the prosecutor added.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said he could not confirm links to jihadism, but Prime Minister Manuel Valls told France 2 television that Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was a "terrorist without doubt linked to radical Islamism in one way or another".

AFP

People in Nice - and across France and the world - have been paying tributes to the victims of Thursday's attack

Some 30,000 people were on the Promenade des Anglais at the time of the attack, officials said.

Residents of Nice and foreign tourists were killed, among them four French citizens, three Algerians, a teacher and two schoolchildren from Germany, three Tunisians, two Swiss, two Americans, a Ukrainian, an Armenian and a Russian.

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A neighbour of the Nice attack suspect says he was frightening and "not normal"

The son of Fatima Charrihi, a 60-year-old Nice resident from Morocco, said she was the first to die. He said she "practised Islam in the proper way. A real Islam, not the terrorists' version".

Tunisian security sources said Lahouaiej-Bouhlel came from the Tunisian town of Msaken. He visited Tunisia frequently, the last time eight months ago.

Justice Minister Jean-Jacques Urvoas said the suspect had been given a suspended sentence earlier this year following a confrontation with another driver but this was his only conviction.

Residents of his apartment building said he was a loner who did not respond when they said hello.

Timeline of terror: France's deadliest Islamist attacks

AP

The attacks on 13 November in Paris left 130 dead