Lyman said the French Alliance of Newport plans to be in contact with a French Alliance chapter in Nice, adding she hopes the attack does not discourage people from visiting the country or traveling overseas. A large truck mowed through revelers gathered for Bastille Day fireworks in Nice, killing more than 80 people and sending people fleeing into the sea as it bore down for more than a mile along the Riviera city’s famed waterfront promenade.
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Radical Islam is likely to blame for the attack in the French coastal city, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said, although he refused to speculate whether the perpetrator was merely inspired by religion, or had received terrorist training.
“If we are at war, as the government tells us, then the currency of war is intelligence, learning from experience, analysing failures and victories”, wrote Yann Marec in an editorial for the southern region’s Midi Libre newspaper. “France was struck on its national day… the symbol of freedom”, the president said in a sombre televised address. As the truck careened down Nice’s famous Promenade des Anglais, which runs along the Mediterranean Sea, it hit Mehdi and Tata, killing them instantly.
In Nice, the seaside streets that would normally be bustling on a summer weekend were near-deserted, with teary residents making their way to the promenade to lay down flowers in memory of the dead.
Christian Estrosi told the French President that “our police are tired” and that it was necessary to improve security within France in the letter dated July 13, 2016.
A spokeswoman for the Nice hospital said 16 bodies had not yet been identified.
Authorities confirmed 202 people were wounded, 25 of whom are on life support, while 52 are in a critical condition.
Hollande said the country would observe three days of mourning as he warned the death toll could rise further, with more than 50 people still fighting for their lives.
Bouhlel’s ex-wife was in police custody, Molins said.
He said the attacker veered wildly from side to side to pick off groups of people “in dribs and drabs”, many of them hiding behind plastic benches that splintered into shards.
Read |Who’s behind Nice attack?
“We can’t extend the state of emergency indefinitely, it would make no sense”.
Mr Kerry, in opening remarks at a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, said his talks late yesterday with Russian President Vladimir Putin had been “extremely frank and very serious”. He was known to police for petty crimes but was not on a watch list of suspected militants.
Anti-terrorism prosecutor Francois Molins said the attack was “exactly in line with” calls from jihadist groups for supporters to kill in their home countries. News reports, however, indicate that the truck in Nice was also loaded with small arms and explosives.
“I was just in front of the window of the truck and trying to wave to him to stop and tell him there is a lot of people under his truck”.
“From 2002 to 2004, he had problems that caused a nervous breakdown”.
The driver, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, was shot dead by officers at the scene.
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Neighbours in the residential neighbourhood in northern Nice where Bouhlel lived described him as a handsome but unsettling man, with a tense personality. “We will continue striking those who attack us on our own soil”, he said in an allusion to the miliant group Islamic State (IS), whose sympathizers have been blamed for a string of terrorist attacks in France and Belgium in the past two years, including coordinated attacks by multiple gunmen and bombers that killed 130 people in Paris in November.
