MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Five arrests believed to be linked to the Nice killer of 84; another 52 remain in critical condition

Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel plowed with a truck through crowds marking Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais on Thursday before he was shot dead by police.

Five people believed to be linked to the man who killed 84 people in Nice are in police custody, the Paris prosecutor's office says. Three arrests were made on Saturday and two on Friday, Le Monde reported. Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel plowed with a truck through crowds marking Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais on Thursday before he was shot dead by police.

 So-called Islamic State claims the truck attack was carried out by one of its followers. A news agency linked to the group, Amaq Agency, said: “He did the attack in response to calls to target the citizens of the coalition that is fighting the Islamic State.”

French President Francois Hollande is expected to chair crisis talks later on Saturday and Sunday. Hollande, who says the attack was a terrorist act, has already extended a state of emergency by three months.

Prosecutors said Tunisian Lahouaiej-Bouhlel drove the truck 2km along the promenade targeting people. Ten of the dead were children. Some 202 people were injured; 52 are critical, of whom 25 are on life support.

Stephanie Simpson, communications director at the Lenval foundation for children in Nice, said five children remained in critical condition, one was in a “very bad” condition, three were on artificial respiration, one has been stabilized and one eight-year-old child remains unidentified.

At the meeting with the security chiefs, Hollande is expected to review all options in response to the attack. A state of emergency has been 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.

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.

President Hollande said the attack was of “an undeniable terrorist nature” and 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”.

Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said the attack 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 radicalization,” the prosecutor added.