“France is horrified by what has just occurred – a monstrous act of using a truck to intentionally kill dozens of people celebrating 14th of July”, Hollande said.
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As France was celebrating Bastille Day on Thursday, a truck crashed into a crowd in Nice, killing 84, injuring dozens and prompting a shootout with police in what is being considered an attack.
The attack appears to have been premeditated.
No militant group has claimed affiliation with the driver, but officials are treating it as an attack either inspired by the so-called Islamic State or carried out with coordination from the group.
Firearms and grenades were found inside the truck as as anti-terrorist investigators took over the Nice attack probe.
In Montreal, a vehicle was used to kill a soldier in October 2014; a year earlier, attackers used a auto to run over an off-duty soldier in London before stabbing him to death.
The terrorist hijackings on September 11, 2001, prompted the installation of more bollards – reinforced posts that block vehicles – around the White House, the U.S. Capitol, federal buildings, airport terminals and local government buildings nationwide.
The chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, opened the hearing by noting federal authorities have arrested more than 90 Islamic State supporters in the U.S.
“A fraction of a second later, an enormous white truck came along at a insane speed, turning the wheel to mow down the maximum number of people”, he wrote. Belgium was the target of a terror attack in March that killed 32 people and injured more than 300. Similarly, a dump truck in Pakistan was loaded with explosives and devastated the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad in 2008, killing 50.
Israel has seen a number of ramming attacks in recent years, mainly where lone Arabs have driven into pedestrians or bus stops, in a tactic dubbed the “run-over intifada”.
“The Gulf Cooperation Council states stand in solidarity with the French republic following this cowardly criminal incident whose perpetrators have been stripped of all moral and human values”, the bloc’s chief Abdullatif al-Zayani said. In the United States, Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people in 1995 by driving a truck laden with explosives into a federal building in Oklahoma City. “France is strong. France will always be stronger than the fanatics who want to strike France today”. Local reports have ID’ed the attacker as Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, adding that he was divorcing from his wife and lived alone. “This is a vicious cycle that is not ending”. Besides continuing the state of emergency and the Sentinel operation with 10,000 soldiers on patrol, he said he was calling up “operational reserves”, those who have served in the past and will be brought in to help police, particularly at French borders. The measure allows for any gathering – such as the Bastille Day festivities – to be banned. On June 23, 2015, a gunman killed 38 people, mostly British holidaymakers, on a beach in Sousse, in an attack that dealt a heavy blow to its tourism industry, which accounts for eight percent of national output. It was the third major attack on French soil in the past 18 months. Last month, a 29-year-old security guard killed 49 people and wounded 53 others at a gay nightclub in Orlando.
French prosecutors earlier said they had launched a terrorism investigation after the lorry careered through the packed seafront for hundreds of yards as crowds watched fireworks.
“No news from Claire who was at the fireworks”, one post said. “It’s obviously very hard to prevent. This is the same idea as Orlando”.
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Hours later, in a small nod to a vanished normality, South African tourist Francois Nel returned to the cafe overlooking the promenade that he, with other patrons, had fled pell-mell as the attack unfolded.
