Dozens of people were killed on Thursday when a gunman drove a heavy truck at high speed into a crowd in Nice who were celebrating Bastille Day, France’s national holiday.
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Authorities have said at least 84 people were killed, with scores others wounded when a truck slammed into a group of revelers celebrating Bastille Day in the Mediterranean city. The assault came just hours after Hollande had said the national state of emergency that has been in place since last year’s deadly terror assault in Paris was slated to end on July 26; it has now been extended for three more months.
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.
Video footage showed men and women – one or two pushing strollers – racing to get away from the promenade with broken bodies splayed out on the asphalt, some of them piled near one another, others bleeding out onto the roadway or twisted into unnatural shapes.
President Hollande said France had been hit by a terrorist attack on its national day, “the 14th of July, the symbol of freedom”. More than 100 people were injured, and 50 children were reported to have been among them.
Police said he was known to them as a petty criminal and his home was being searched. There is a chain of complicity.
Key said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs so far has no reports of any New Zealanders among the killed or injured, though it is aware of some Kiwis that were in the vicinity at the time of the attack.
U.S. President Barack Obama issued a statement saying, “We stand in solidarity and partnership with France, our oldest ally, as they respond to and recover from this attack”.
The driver of the lorry was shot dead by police.
“I hardly knew him but from what I could see he seemed very weird”, a neighbor of the alleged suspect told The Telegraph newspaper. “We will continue to reinforce our actions in Syria and Iraq”, Hollande said, according to a translation of his remarks by France 24. I will never again go out into a crowd like that. In September 2014, then-spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani referred to “the filthy French” in a statement telling Muslims within the country to attack them in any way they could, including “crush them with your auto”.
He said he was extending a state of emergency by three months.
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 soldiers arrive on the Avenue des Champs-Elysees before the start of the annual Bastille Day military parade in Paris on Thursday.
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Sunni Islam’s leading centre of learning, Al-Azhar, said the “vile terrorist attack” contradicted Islam and called for “uniting efforts to defeat terrorism and rid the world of its evil”.
