At about 10:30 pm, he arrives in Magnan, a neighborhood just north of the famous palm-fringed boulevard, which was packed with people for a fireworks show. She was wary about the crowds, which is why she made a decision to visit a relative in Monte Carlo on Thursday evening to enjoy the Bastille Day fireworks. He hid there until he felt it was safe to emerge.
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“It seems that the attacker got radicalized very rapidly”, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Saturday about Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the man police say drove a truck through a crowd in Nice, killing 84 people.
Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who had celebrated Bastille Day with dinner at the French Embassy in London, described the attack as “appalling and cowardly”. In France, that’s essentially their version of July 4.
They fanned out to enjoy nighttime street artists, arcade games and food stalls or strolls back to their hotels beside the gentle Mediterranean tide. And, tragically, that’s why so many children were amongst the casualties. He enters the truck and drives toward Promenade des Anglais.
The police gunfire kept the attacker from reaching much larger crowds where “hundreds of people could have been killed”, he said.
MELISSA CHARLET, Eyewitness: It was frightful. We saw the truck and, suddenly, life came to a halt.
“We heard lots of people screaming, and we saw the truck continuing very, very fast”, he said.
FRANCOIS, Eyewitness: Everybody was running.
“This will definitely have an impact on travel, and on how people perceive the wider safety of France”.
“I want to call on all French patriots who wish to do so, to join this operational reserve”, said Cazeneuve of a force which is now made up of 12,000 volunteers aged between 17 and 30. “Sean and his oldest son, Austin, had run with the bulls, and they’d just been touring Europe”. And it was really scary.
Bouhlel, shot to death by police after his rampage, was convicted in March this year, French Justice Minister Jean-Jacques Urvoas said. Police are now investigating how Lahouaiej Bouhlel got the weapon and the truck to commit the crime.
Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel was named as the suspect who also opened fire on the crowd during a Bastille Day celebration.
Despite numerous French officials terming it a terrorist attack, by nightfall on Friday, officials still had not disclosed any direct evidence linking Bouhlel with extremists.
JANE FERGUSON: This afternoon, the truck was hauled away from the scene.
In times like these it’s often easier to see what we shouldn’t do than what we should, because there inevitably will be voices counseling us to embrace our fears and act on them.
JANE FERGUSON: Hollande has called up military and police reservists, and is moving to extend a state of emergency for three more months.
Nearly exactly eight months ago Islamic State militants killed 130 people in Paris. In Washington, President Obama reflected on the tragedy, as he hosted a diplomatic reception. And this is a threat to all of us. There was not even a thing anyone could do, there was no CPR, bits of him were lying around.
The three people were detained after police special forces raided at least one address in Nice at 6am.
Clémence Bectarte, a lawyer at the International Federation for Human Rights in Paris, said the bloodbath in Nice was “the flawless proof that the state of emergency is not an effective tool”, noting that more than 3,500 house raids have been carried out across the country since the state of emergency was instituted with little to show for it. How is this affecting the politics of the country?
“We threw ourselves to the right where there were parked cars”. The man was “entirely unknown by the intelligence services, whether nationally or locally”, Molins said.
He was asked on TF1 television if he was in a position to draw a link between radical Islam and the attack but his answer was “no”.
The veracity of the group’s claim couldn’t immediately be determined, but French officials didn’t dispute it.
Now, here, where the attack took place, people have been coming down to pay their respects today. “But I saw something else”. People have been lighting candles and leaving mementos here. However, a journalist for French daily newspaper Les Echos took to Twitter to report that a government source had disclosed that the app experienced technical difficulties post the deadly attack.
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“Yet again we’ve been rather fortunate, with the sheer number of Australians who would be in France on any one day”.
