Britain in shock over Tunisia attack

At least eight of the 38 people killed in a terrorist attack in Tunisia have been identified as Britons and it is thought most others are also British.

Injured people are treated where an attack took place in Tunisia

Five British citizens have been killed in the gun massacre at a packed holiday resort in Tunisia. (AAP) Source: AP

Britain is in shock as it braces for news of further casualties from the bloody attack on a Tunisian beach resort, which has already caused the worst loss of British life in a terror incident since the 2005 London bombings.

Tunisian authorities said they had identified at least eight Britons among the 38 killed by an Islamist gunman on Friday, but Prime Minister Habib Essid said most of the dead were believed to be British.

British Prime Minister David Cameron also warned the death toll would rise.

"I'm afraid that the British public need to be prepared for the fact that many of those killed were British," Cameron said.

As the grim process of identifying the bodies continued on Saturday, travel firms began repatriating thousands of British tourists from beach resorts around the attack site near Sousse, about 140 kilometres south of Tunis.

There are about 20,000 British tourists on package holidays in Tunisia, according to ABTA, the country's largest travel association.

Cameron said the government would "do everything necessary to get people home" and, as well as providing consular assistance, had deployed police and Red Cross experts to the north African country.

Among those caught up in the massacre at the five-star Riu Imperial Marhaba Hotel, in the popular resort of Port el Kantaoui, were tourists travelling with TUI UK group operators Thomson and First Choice.

TUI sent 10 planes on Saturday to repatriate about 2500 customers, and said it was cancelling all its holidays to Tunisia for the next week.

The attack made front page news in all of Britain's newspapers on Saturday, with headlines such as "Slaughter on the beach" accompanying stark photographs of bodies lying in the sand covered by beach towels.

The attack is the deadliest terror incident for Britain since 52 people were killed by four suicide bombers in an attack on the London transport system on July 7, 2005.

Many papers carried the tale of 30-year-old Matthew James, from Wales, who was shot three times - in the shoulder, chest and hip - while trying to protect his fiancee, the mother of his two children. Miraculously, he survived.

The mass shooting, the deadliest in Tunisia's recent history and the second attack on tourists in the country within three months, was claimed by the Islamic State jihadist group, which controls large parts of Iraq and Syria.

The attack came on the same day 26 people were killed at a Shi'ite mosque in Kuwait, in a bombing also claimed by the IS group, and the same day that a suspected Islamist attacked a factory in France.

Cameron chaired a meeting of the British government's Cobra emergency committee on Saturday and has spoken to the Tunisian president.


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Source: AAP



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