“It will also try to find out whether Mohamed Laouaiej Bouhlel had ties to Islamist terrorist organisations”, he said.
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On Friday, at least 80 people were killed after a truck loaded with guns slammed into revelers watching a fireworks display for Bastille Day celebration in Nice.
Witnesses said Bouhlel first crashed into crowds near the five-star Hotel Negresco, then rolled slowly down an otherwise empty road chased by police on foot and, possibly, one on a motorcycle. French President Francois Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls rushed to Nice, 690 km south of Paris, to offer their condolences after the emergency meeting.
Hollande said in a pre-dawn address that he was calling up military and police reservists to relieve forces worn out by enforcing a state of emergency begun in November after Islamic State gunmen and suicide bombers struck Paris entertainment spots on a Friday evening, killing 130 people. 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.
“This is a threat to all of us”, the president said.
He had three children but lived separately from his wife, who was taken into police custody on Friday, prosecutor Francois Molins said.
Stephanie Simpson, the communications director for the Lenval foundation hospital, said that injuries included fractures and head injuries and that the victims were aged 18 or under. Of the scores of injured, 25 were on life support, authorities said on Friday.
Maria Barbosa, 31, who works as a building concierge in Nice, said she and her family narrowly missed being on the promenade when the attack hit.
Eric Ciotti, a lawmaker representing Nice in the General Assembly of France, told Europe 1 that he saw the man’s courageous act and that the driver tried to shoot him. “It’s at that moment that the police were able to neutralize this terrorist. Heard noises, cries that I will never forget”.
Molins said the attack precisely fit the profile of Daesh extremist violence and threats but added that Bouhlel had no known links with terrorist groups.
Estrosi told BFM TV that “the driver fired on the crowd, according to the police who killed him”.
Video footage showed men and women – one or two pushing prams – racing to get away from the scene.
Damien Allemand, a journalist for the regional newspaper Nice-Matin who was at the waterside, said the fireworks display had finished and the crowd had got up to leave when they heard a noise and cries.
Wassim Bouhlel, a Nice native who spoke to the AP nearby, said that he saw a truck drive into the crowd.
“I saw bodies flying like bowling pins along its route”. “And I don’t want to hear the same old thing I usually hear: ‘We are creating a commission to investigate'”.
“Help my mother, please!” one person yells out amid a cacophony of screaming and crying. A pink girl’s bicycle is briefly seen overturned by the side of the road. Mr. Hollande from the left.
If our leaders won’t even say the word, how will we ever understand the enemy we face?
His Belgian counterpart, Mr Charles Michel, said in Brussels – where Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants staged attacks in March and where they planned last November’s Paris attacks – that “zero risk does not exist”.
No Saudi citizens were among those killed or wounded in the terrorist attack Thursday night in the French city of Nice, according to the Kingdom’s ambassador to France.
European Council President Donald Tusk said it was a “tragic paradox” that the victims of the attack in Nice were celebrating “liberty, equality and fraternity” – France’s motto – on the country’s national day.
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Nice’s famed Promenade des Anglais, at the heart of city life – and the killing path of the truck – became a place of grieving with bouquets of flowers piling up as residents, some with candles, paid tribute to the dead.
