London - Britain was in shock Saturday as it braced 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. He said: "I'm afraid that the British public need to be prepared for the fact that many of those killed were British."
As the grim process of identifying the bodies continued, travel firms began repatriating thousands of British tourists from beach resorts around the attack site near Sousse, about 140 kilometres (87 miles) south of Tunis.
There are currently 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 ten planes on Saturday to repatriate about 2,500 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 fiancée, the mother of his two children. Miraculously, he survived.
AFP
