“I went to bed and started to hear people screaming and I saw people running, running, running, police, people crying, people screaming”, she said.
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“He was a little bit insane”, he said, but he added that he was shocked by what had happened. Six people are still being detained.
Valls has said there were no failures, although Cazeneuve acknowledged on Saturday that the truck had avoided the police vehicles blocking the way to the promenade by mounting a kerb.
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said the attack made her “sick at heart”. She said the boy was on artificial respiration and had not undergone any surgery. Simpson said “there is still hope he is going to wake up”. Bouhlel phoned his brother hours before the truck attack and sent a picture of himself laughing as he mingled with the crowd, the brother told Reuters.
The driver’s father has said that Bouhlel had received psychiatric treatment in the past. Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve says he could not confirm the attacker’s motives were linked to jihadism. He says the group sees “the noose closing around them”.
The woman was released Sunday. She is the mother of Bouhlel’s three children, and was in the process of divorcing him. He is a 31-year-old Tunisian resident of Nice.
Investigators hunting for possible accomplices to Bouhlel arrested two people Sunday.
– By Thomas Adamson in Paris.
The IS claim of responsibility came after the French authorities said Bouhlel had no known links with terrorists, unlike those behind previous attacks in Paris. The official did not give his name.
Speaking after visiting the hospital where victims were treated, he also said that France was “facing a struggle which will be long”.
Many family members have been frustrated by a lack of information about their missing loved ones.
French president François Hollande chaired a meeting of security and defence chiefs at the Élysée Palace at 9am, having chose to extend by a further three months a state of emergency that was put in place after multiple terrorist attacks in Paris last November.
Francis then offered “a paternal and fraternal embrace for all of Nice’s inhabitants and all of France”, and invited those in the square to join him in silent prayer for the 84 Nice victims and their families.
Release of the movie, directed by James Watkins, had already been postponed following the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris last November (16), as the plot begins with a fatal bomb attack on the French capital.
“The investigation will establish the facts, but we know now that the killer was radicalized very quickly”, Valls said in an interview with Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche.
French Health Minister Marisol Touraine said the 18, including one child, were in a critical condition, while about 85 people in total were still hospitalised.
Detectives investigating the Bastille Day lorry attack have arrested two further people, as tourists return to the French promenade where scores of people were mown down.
She added: “The whole width of the truck was full of people in front of it and it just drove over the people and they fell, like the driver was bowling”. Bouhlel’s estranged wife is taken into custody together with another person.
In a statement via its Amaq news service, Isis said one of its “soldiers” carried out the attack “in response to calls to target nations of coalition states that are fighting [Isis]”. Some spots are still identifiable by bloodstains. Joggers, bikers and sunbathers populated the pedestrian walkway along the glistening Mediterranean Sea, where well-wishers placed flowers, French flags, stuffed animals and candles. He has also enacted the Operation Sentinel, introduced after terror attacks in January 2015 that allow 10,000 extra military personnel to boost the ranks of security forces across the country.
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“We are now confronted with individuals open to IS’s message to engage in extremely violent actions without necessarily having been trained or having the weapons to carry out a mass [casualty] attack”, he said.
