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Attack on Nice: French PM Valls booed at commemoration

Hollande said “it is our honor and our duty”.

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French MPs will mull a fourth extension of the eight-month-old state of emergency, as criticism mounted of the Socialist government’s response to a slew of extremist attacks.

Hollande was speaking Tuesday during a visit to Portugal.

Italy is investigating if the Nice truck attacker recently had contacts with Tunisians living in the southeastern Puglia region, according to news agency ANSA. He had previously been declared missing.

Though there is no evidence Bouhlel was working alongside Isis in carrying out the Bastille Day attack, his uncle, Sadok, has claimed his nephew was indoctrinated about two weeks ago by a member of Isis in Nice.

Romanian President Klaus Iohannis sent his condolences and said the country would remain “together with our European and worldwide partners in the fight against terrorism”.

The truck driver who killed 84 people on a Nice beachfront had accomplices and appears to have been plotting his attack for months, the Paris prosecutor said Thursday, citing text messages, more than 1,000 phone calls and video of the attack scene on the phone of one of five people facing terror charges.

The French government is defending its efforts to fight Islamic State extremists overseas and at home, announcing new airstrikes against their strongholds in the past two days.

Another student was injured and continues to receive treatment.

Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier says “This bad attack shows that terror is directed against everyone without distinction”.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve says the government has bolstered security notably by sending thousands of troops into the streets.

The health minister, Marisol Touraine, said 85 people were still in hospital, including 18 in a critical condition.

Cazeneuve suggested to France’s RTL radio that the attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, 31, was radicalised too quickly to be picked up by the French authorities.

The boy is among six children still hospitalized after the attack, Simpson said.

In Nice, many people were still desperately waiting for news of their loved ones.

The son of Fatima Charrihi, a 60-year-old Nice resident from Morocco, said she was the first to die.

Two replica assault rifles and a dummy grenade were also found in the truck, which he rented a few days earlier and used for reconnaissance on the seafront on the two consecutive days before the attack.

The Foreign Ministry identified the dead as Maria Grazia Ascoli, 77, and Mario Casati, 90, of Milan; Angelo D’Agostino, 71, and his wife Gianna Muset, 68, both of Voghera; and Carla Gaveglio, 48, of Piasco, in the Piedmont region.

Local authorities have put in place measures meant to spot radicalization and encourage friends or family members to report what Nice Mayor Philippe Pradal called “weak signals, ” such as changed eating habits or sudden interest in religion.

Mejri said he plans to sue the authorities over what happened.

While some relatives and friends described the delivery driver as someone who drank heavily and never attended the local mosque, others questioned by investigators spoke of “a recent shift to militancy”, said a police source. Bouhlel was killed by police after barreling his 19-ton truck down Nice’s famed Promenade des Anglais, mowing down those who had come to see holiday fireworks.

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Mourners have formed a human chain to remove flowers, candles and other mementos placed along the Promenade des Anglais as spontaneous memorials to the victims of the Bastille Day attack in preparation to open the westbound lane.

France is holding a national moment of silence for 84 people killed by a truck rampage in Nice and thousands of people are massed on the waterfront