Christian Estrosi, president of the Nice region, told French TV that the motorist “fired on the crowd, according to the police who killed him” and said that “the truck was loaded with arms, loaded with grenades”.
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The Bastille Day firework display was about to finish and local residents and tourists in Nice were preparing to head home when terror struck.
Humbert said the driver was not yet identified. On Sunday, France had breathed a sigh of relief as the month-long Euro 2016 soccer tournament ended without a feared attack.
Another woman told the station she was sheltering in a restaurant on the promenade with some 200 other people, where things had calmed down about two hours after the incident.
“We turned around and heard yelling and screaming and everyone running towards us, and when we looked there were four to five police cars going by us and so we began running in the direction people were running”, Phillips said.
The French interior ministry spokesman said that there was no hostage situation at the moment in the fatal attack. It published a photograph of a damaged, long-distance delivery truck, which it said was riddled with bullets and images of emergency services treating the injured.
Nearly exactly eight months ago Islamic State militants killed 130 people in Paris on November 13, the bloodiest in a number of attacks in France and Belgium in the past two years.
Damien Allemand, the paper’s correspondent, was quoted as saying: “People are running”. There are people covered in blood. Many dead and injured.
One image on Twitter showed about a dozen people lying on the street, some being tended to. The probe is being handled by France’s intelligence agency and judicial police.
A senior USA military source told NBC News that French authorities are reporting that the truck “purposefully” and “maliciously” struck the crowd.
US President Barack Obama said in a statement: “On behalf of the American people, I condemn in the strongest terms what appears to be a horrific terrorist attack in Nice, France, which killed and wounded dozens of innocent civilians”.
Estrosi said the truck was drivien by someone who appeared to have “completely premeditated behavior”. The witness said the driver mowed people down, accelerating as he hit them. There may have a second person in the truck, we don’t know yet.
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The attack happened the same day that French President Francois Hollande lifted a state of emergency that had been in place since January. “We just told them it was part of the fireworks”.
