Nice prosecutor Jean-Michel Prette said bodies were strewn about along the roadway.
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French police said identification found with the body of the driver-assailant, who was shot dead in an exchange of gunfire, was that of Mohamed Lagouaiej Bouhlel, a French citizen of Tunisian descent described as a 31-year-old petty criminal from the Nice area.
CNN said it has spoken to a witness, identified as an American pilot, who saw the truck ramming the crowd. Ciotti said identification papers were found in the truck and that investigators were trying to determine whether they were legitimate.
Ambulances line up near the scene of the Nice attack. AP.
Molins said Bouhlel, originally from Tunisia, was “known to police” and had a previous sentence for a weapons charge.
French President Francois Hollande denounced what happened in Nice as a terror attack.
A woman from Perthshire has spoken of her narrow escape after a lorry careered through a crowd in Nice killing 84 people. French Secretary of State Juliette Méadel asked that photos and videos of the attack not be shared on social media out of respect for the victims.
The state of emergency, which was implemented following the Paris attacks in November and set to expire at the end of the month, will now continue at least for three more months. This time it was on Bastille Day, the national holiday that celebrates democracy – a value at the very heart of French society.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and other loved ones of those killed, and we wish a full recovery for the many wounded”, Obama said in a statement.
In an interview on Fox News, Donald Trump said that “this is war” and called the Islamic State militant group a “cancer”, although it has not yet claimed responsibility for the attack.
IS has repeatedly singled out France as a prime target for its military action against the group in Iraq and Syria, and hundreds of jihadists have left France to fight in its ranks.
“He rode up onto the Prom and piled into the crowd”, said Damien Allemand, a journalist for French regional newspaper Nice Matin, who watched the horror unfold. The assault on revelers in the southern French city rocked a nation still dealing with the aftermath of two attacks in Paris a year ago that killed 147 people and were claimed by the Islamic State extremist group. “We want to ensure the French residents that they are not alone”.
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UC Berkeley student Sohrob Nayebaziz, 19, had been enjoying the evening’s festivities on the nearby beach, not far from Promenade des Anglais-“the PCH [Pacific Coast Highway] of Nice”, he says, running four miles along the Mediterranean-which had been turned into a pedestrian thoroughfare, packed with food vendors and pop-up stages. “My wife’s comment to me later. she said it was like a zombie attack”.
