Truck Attack In France Kills At Least 84
NICE, FRANCE: A truck rammed into a crowd celebrating Bastille Day in the French Riviera city of Nice on Thursday night, killing at least 84 people in an apparent terrorist attack in which the driver also opened fire on revelers, before being shot dead by police.
The truck struck the crowd after a fireworks display for the French national day on the Promenade des Anglais, a seaside walk in the city in southern France. The Interior Ministry said Friday that 84 were killed. Earlier Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said another 18 were critically injured.
In a series of Twitter messages, he said that the truck was carrying arms and explosives when it struck the crowd about 10:30 p.m. local time.
There was no immediate information on the identity of the driver or what motivated his action.
In an address early Friday morning, President Francois Hollande condemned the “attack whose terrorist nature cannot be denied.” He announced that France would ramp up its military efforts in Syria and Iraq and that the country’s state of emergency, which had been imposed after Islamist militants killed 130 people in Paris last November, would be extended three months.
Local authorities were treating the incident as a terrorist attack and urging people to stay home, BFM TV reported.
Witnesses said bodies of victims were strewn over the road for more than a mile. Graphic video and photographs flooded social media. In some, bodies could be seen lying on the boulevard where the truck plowed into the crowd. Revelers ran away from the scene while sirens blared.
In Washington, President Obama released a statement Thursday night condemning “what appears to be a horrific terrorist attack in Nice, France.” He said he had directed his team to get in touch with French officials to assist with the investigation into the attack.
CNN quoted an American witness as saying he saw one person in the large white truck and heard gunfire, although it was not clear whether it came from the driver or was being fired at the vehicle.
The witness said the driver accelerated as he was mowing people down.
The Associated Press quoted Wassim Bouhlel, a Nice native, as saying that after slamming into the crowd, the truck driver emerged with a gun and started shooting.
There was no immediate assertion of responsibility for the bloodshed, although jihadist networks were celebrating it on social media.
The apparent attack was the latest in a string of horrific incidents that have unfolded across Europe in the past 18 months. In March, Islamic State attackers killed 32 people in suicide bombings at the Brussels airport and a metro station.
France was rocked by a devastating terrorist attack in November, when heavily armed suicide bombers killed 130 people in several places around Paris. The Islamic State asserted responsibility for that attack, the worst bloodshed on French soil since World War II.
News footage from the scene of the Nice incident showed the truck’s windshield riddled with bullet holes.
Analysts noted that the Islamic State has called on its followers to kill civilians in Western countries by any means possible.
The Islamic State has previously called for attacks using vehicles, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist statements. It said supporters of the radical Islamist organization, also known as ISIS or ISIL, were sharing the news of the Nice attack and “celebrating the massacre.”
Pro-Islamic State forums posted old messages in which the terrorist group urged followers to carry out lone-wolf attacks against France.
Police said people in the vicinity should stay home and follow instructions from authorities. Police urged people not to spread rumors or broadcast shocking videos of the scene.
A reporter for Agence France-Presse called it “absolute chaos.”
In a subsequent tweet, Trump said he was postponing a news conference scheduled for Friday “concerning my Vice Presidential announcement.”
Within half an hour of initial reports of the incident, Facebook had activated its “safety check” feature for people in Nice. On Twitter, others used the hashtag #PortesOuvertesNice (“OpenDoorsNice”) to find and offer refuge to those who needed a place to stay.
In a tweet, the city of Nice urged people to seek shelter that way, and the hashtag was soon trending globally.
Meanwhile, taxis in the city were providing free rides to people seeking to leave the scene.
The attack came on one of France’s most treasured holidays, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. In Paris, the occasion is marked by a military parade down the Champs-Elysees, the oldest and largest regularly scheduled military parade in Europe.
On Nice’s Promenade des Anglais, which skirts the Mediterranean coast where thousands of revelers had gathered to watch a fireworks display, music mixed with the sounds of laughter and the crackle of fireworks for most of the night.
Violet said she saw bodies covered in blue sheets and families mourning loved ones – two sisters and a brother from Poland who had lost two siblings; a family whose mother had died. She guessed that the family was Muslim, because some members were wearing headscarves.
Zeynep Akar, who had watched the fireworks from her balcony, told CNN that the truck drove into crowds right outside her home.
As everyone who could sought shelter, only emergency responders and relatives of those killed remained at the scene.
Photos showed horror-stricken mourners crouched over blanket-covered bodies. A Reuters photographer captured a small figure covered in a foil sheet; a child’s doll lay next to the body.
Jimmy Ghazal, 39, a Lebanese man visiting Nice with his family, told ABC News that he had been watching the fireworks with thousands of other people when he heard the crack of gunshots.
© 2016 The Washington Post
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