This is coming as police has identified a 31-year-old Tunisian-born Frenchman as the driver who plowed a truck into crowds celebrating Bastille Day in the southern French city of Nice.
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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. The truck’s driver opens fire on police but is shot dead as he attempts to flee, first into a restaurant and then into the sea.
French president Francois Hollande said, “We can not deny that it was a terrorist attack”.
Several possible scenarios were studied including bacteriological and chemical attacks and a raid from the sea.The possibility of someone deliberately driving a truck into crowds on the city’s celebrated sea-front drive, the Promenade des Anglais, was not one of the possibilities considered. “It’s at that moment that the police were able to neutralize this terrorist”.
Video footage showed men and women – one or two pushing strollers – racing to get away from the scenes.
“Nobody knew what was going on at a time because there were fireworks happening for a good 15 minutes, loud, and then it ended, and then all of a sudden you heard that very odd noise”, Davis said, describing the chaos that ensued in the first minutes after the attack.
Hollande extended the state of Emergency in France for three more months beyond July 26 and called in the reservists.
Taking to twitter, he reassured people: ‘France is mournful, devastated, but she is strong and will always be stronger than the fanatics that want to strike her today’.
Dirco says there’s been no indication, from its embassy in France, of any South Africans affected in the terror attacks in Nice.
The truck was riddled with bullet holes and badly damaged, with burst tyres.
Modi said the “mindless act of violence” was appalling and India shares the pain and stands firmly with France in this hour of “immense sadness”.
He said: “Well I knew someone was doing it on objective – someone was driving it to kill people”.
“People were tripping over and trying to get into hotel lobbies and restaurants or vehicle parks or anywhere they could to get away from the street”. 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.
Both presidential candidates also condemned the attacks, with Republican Donald Trump declaring “this is war” and Democrat Hillary Clinton vowing “we will not be intimidated”.
“A fraction of a second later, a huge white truck flew by at a insane speed, driving over people, twisting the wheel to cut down the maximum number of people”.
Germany’s top security official says the attack in Nice is “incomprehensible and simply very bad”, and that “this barbaric murder must be finally brought to an end”. No one has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, but officers were searching Bouhlel’s home in the Abattoirs neighborhood of the French Riviera city on Thursday, according to Nice-Matin.
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Abu Mohammed al-Adnani released a statement in September 2014 in which he urged ISIS sympathisers to carry out attacks on “disbelieving” Westerners.
