A truck barrelled down the famed Promenade des Anglais seafront, sending hundreds of terrified people fleeing and leaving bodies strewn in its wake in what has been described as the “worst catastrophe” in the French Riviera’s modern history.
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Officers reportedly found guns and grenades inside the truck.
“We can not deny that it was a terror attack”, Hollande said in a national television address.
He gave the latest death toll as 77 after a truck plowed into people celebrating Bastille Day at a fireworks display on the city’s famous Promenade des Anglais.
A man reacts as he sits near a French flag along the beachfront the day after a truck ran into a crowd at high speed killing scores celebrating Bastille Day.
The attacker struck after a day of military pomp and ceremony in Paris – where armed forces, tanks and fighter jets swooped down the Champs Elysees avenue – and spectacular firework displays.
A photograph showed the front of the truck riddled with bullet holes and badly damaged, with burst tyres.
“There were families just laying down, crying next to these bodies”.
“We are very sorry and very much with the French people and the French government”, he said in at a meeting of Asian and European leaders in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar.
“It’s a lively city and we’ve many, many people there on the 14 July”.
“I grabbed my son, and i just felt like shielding him and protecting him from seeing that”, she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
On Twitter, people mobilised fast, with citizens offering safe refuge under the hashtag #PortesOuvertesNice (Nice Open Doors).
The mayor of Nice has posted on social media that dozens were dead, according to NBC Nightly News. France has launched a terrorism investigation into the tragedy.
The bloodshed comes eight months after Islamic State jihadist attacks on Paris nightspots left 130 people dead. “I strongly condemn the perpetrators of the terrorist attack”, Mukherjee said in a tweet on Friday morning.
US President Barack Obama was being briefed, the White House said.
He also called up army reservists to bolster the country’s security services that are stretched to the limit.
France has been under a state of emergency ever since the November 13 Paris carnage, which came after 17 were killed in another attack in January at various sites including the offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Jewish supermarket.
The Mediterranean city of Nice, with its pebble beaches and clear blue water, has been a magnet for sun-seekers and the jet-set since the 19th century.
“I suddenly heard the crash and people shouting”, Akar told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
“He looked nervous. There was a girl under the vehicle, he smashed her”. “He’s really shaken”, she said. “You can see wreckage all along the way, a body, bicycles, street lamps and debris everywhere”, he said.
“They killed him and his head was out the window”.
Local authorities were treating the incident as an attack and urging people to stay home, the French television channel BFM TV reported. She called the incident “an attack”.
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NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston reports that no one has taken responsibility, but that domestic and worldwide officials had been warning about an attack on a so-called soft target like this one for months and that officials at a spring meeting of law enforcement authorities had expressed concern about a summertime assault in France.
