The warning follows the latest terrorist attack in France, where a man drove a truck into a crowd at a Bastille Day celebration in the French Riviera resort city of Nice, killing at least 84 people and injuring scores more. The seaside city, not far from Nice and one of France’s largest, announced the cancellation after an attack on Nice’s waterfront promenade left at least 84 people dead.
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Police killed the driver “apparently after an exchange of gunfire”, Eric Ciotti, the ranking politician of the Alpes-Maritime department that includes Nice, told BFM television.
France will begin a three-day period of mourning on Saturday. “There is a chain of complicity”.
An education official said the children’s fate was unknown.
“I strongly condemn the cowardly terrorist attack that ensanguined Nice on the (French) National Day”. Powerful images show the aftermath and the bullet-riddled vehicle. “I won’t forget the look of this policewoman who intercepted the killer”.
Mr Hollande addressed the nation in the early hours of Friday saying France had been “badly hit” but was strong, adding “we need to do everything we can to fight against” such attacks.
Hollande summoned a defense council meeting Friday with other key ministers and officials, before heading to Nice.
Hollande also said he would activate those who had once served in the military and the gendarmerie to help relieve police and active-duty soldiers.
Nader el-Shafei told the BBC he saw the driver face-to-face for about a minute: “He was very nervous… looking for something around him, I kept yelling at him and waving my hands to stop. he picked up his gun and started to shoot police”.
The tournament brought an all-too-brief burst of joy to a gloomy France, bogged down after the two attacks in 2015, violent anti-government protests, strikes and floods.
French leaders on Friday extended the country’s 9-month-old state of emergency and vowed to deploy thousands of police reservists on the streets after Thursday night’s massacre of pedestrians leaving a fireworks display for France’s national independence day.
France has long known it is a top target for the Islamic State group.
The 31-year-old French-Tunisian in Nice apparently was not on any watch list, however, and while Islamic State supporters on social media celebrated the attack, there was no claim of responsibility from the group, according to the SITE group, which monitors jihadist communications. In September 2014, then-IS spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani referred to “the filthy French”, telling Muslims within the country to attack them in any way they could, including “crush them with your auto”.
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Calvar said he feared increasingly armed far-right groups could launch “punitive expeditions” against immigrant communities as part of revenge attacks, and that other European Union countries, including Britain, could also suffer a similar fate. And Nice has been at the center of the movement, home to one of the most prolific creators of jihadi recruiting videos for the French-speaking world, a former petty drug dealer named Omar Omsen who is now fighting in Syria. In March, the same Islamic State cell struck in Belgium.
