Nearly 24 hours after a Bastille Day celebration was transformed into a nightmare, “locals and visitors returned to the Promenade des Anglais to lay flowers for the dead and to wonder exactly how, and why, the unthinkable had come to pass,” my colleague Sam Jones reports from the city.
Throughout Friday, impromptu shrines had sprung up along the metal barriers that closed off the promenade. From one hung a tricolor with a black ribbon sewn on to the white central stripe. At another, a picture of Buddha watched over a dozen small candles. Someone had left a cigarette lighter and more nightlights on the ground so others could light candles and offer prayers.
Madame Bourmault, who lives two minutes from the promenade, came to one of the shrines with a bunch of flowers in her hand and tears in her eyes.
“I can’t sleep and I can’t breathe. It’s just horrible,” she said.
“What else can you say?” She had been down by the firework display on Thursday night, and seen a sudden tide of people screaming and running away. “In a fraction of a second, the music stopped and there was a lot of screaming. Everyone was running and no one was helping.”
On Bormault’s mind was a question that many around the world are asking: how had the truck managed to get on to the promenade? “It’s normally closed to traffic,” she said. However, she did not blame the police. “I don’t know what else the police could have done, but I don’t understand how the truck got in.”
She added: “You can’t put a policeman behind everyone - and there area lot of crazy people in this world.”
A memorial in Paris. Photograph: Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA
Leila Pasini, an Italian tourist from Milan on holiday in Nice, had been on the promenade before the attack but had returned to the flat where she was staying to make sure her dog was OK.
“We left just before the truck came and then I looked out of the window and saw a river of people running and crying. It looked like the apocalypse but I didn’t know what was going on.”
Pasini said she had heard that the truck had been close to the promenade for a long time and that the driver had explained that he was delivering ice.
“I don’t know whether that’s true or not,” she said. “But if it is true, then that’s very serious. Why would a truck be there for so long?”
By nine o’clock last night, life on the Rue de France, which runs close to the promenade, was slowly returning to normal. A few hundred yards from the scene of the atrocity, people walked their dogs and sat eating on restaurant terraces. Past them walked couples carrying flowers and clutching each other’s hands tightly.
Ita Murray and her friend Jackie Ellis, had arrived in Nice from London a few hours before the attack. They had intended to go and watch the fireworks but the day’s traveling had got the better of them and they chose to stay on their balcony.
“About 11, we saw all these youngsters running and screaming,” said Murray. “They were tearing around and we thought it was a prank.”
It wasn’t until nine on Friday morning, when they were awoken by phone calls from their anxious families, that they understood what all the shouting and running had been about. And that their fatigue had been a blessing.
“We were just too tired,” said Ellis. “Otherwise we would have been up
there because there’s always something going on.”
A gathering on the Promenade des Anglais. Photograph: Carl Court/Getty Images
Two hundred and two people were injured and 52 people remain in critical care, 25 on life support, French prosecutor François Molins said. Three or four children are in extremely critical condition, a doctor told the Guardian. The dead include two Americans, a Russian student and a motorcyclist who tried to board the truck to stop the driver.
President François Hollande called the attack “terrorism of opportunity” at a 4am address, and announced three days of mourning and an extended national emergency. He now faces political backlash over the country’s struggling security services.
The attacker was named as Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a chauffeur and deliveryman who was born in Tunis but had lived in France for years. Three police officers exchanged fire with Lahouaiej-Bouhlel during his rampage, and found him dead in the passenger seat of the truck, Molins said.
Police found two automatic weapons, ammunition, a mobile phone and documents in the truck, the prosecutor said. They also found fake weapons in the vehicle and more documents at Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s residence.
Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had a history of threats, violence and petty theft, Molins said, dating from 2010 to 2016, and had been sentenced in March to six-months in prison for a road rage incident.
But he was “totally unknown” to French counter-terrorism agencies, Molins said,and so far authorities have not found links to terror groups or evidence of radicalization. Prime minister Manuel Valls said that he “probably” had some a link to extremism, but admitted the investigation has no evidence at this point.
Police have taken the gunman’s ex-wife in for questioning; Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was a father of three. Molins said they are also investigating whether he acted alone or had accomplices.
No terror group has taken credit for the attack, though certain elements mirror recent attacks by the Islamic State (Isis) and its sympathizers.
Embassies and French authorities have urged concerned relatives to call for information, as worried loved ones wait for news amid horrifying witness accounts of the attack.
Barack Obama called for unity around the world in the wake of the Nice attack, and rejected calls to target Muslims or minority groups. “We cannot let ourselves be divided by religion because that’s exactly what the terrorists want.,” he said. “We should never do their work for them.”
Authorities have identified the nationalities of more victims, though not all of their names, as officials continue to contact families around the world.
French authorities and families have identified four victims. Parisian Timothe Fournier, 27, died after pushing his pregnant wife out of the truck’ path, his cousin Anais told AFP. “He was a great guy,” she said, “a young dreamer but someone who was always there for his wife and his future child.”
Also killed were 28-year-old economics teacher Michael Pellegrini, 60-year-old athletics club president Robert Marchand, and 45-year-old police commissioner Emmanuel Grout, 45, who was off duty and watching the fireworks, according to local media.
A student fromthe University of California, Berkeley, remains missing, the school has said in a statement. Three other students were wounded.
The missing student is 20-year-old Nicolas Leslie, one of 85 students on a two-week trip to study abroad in Europe. The university said that two other students had broken legs and a third had a broken foot.
Two Swiss citizens, a woman and a child, were killed, according to the foreign ministry in Geneva. The mayor of the town of Agno named the woman as Linda Casanova Siccardi, a 54-year-old customs agent, who was traveling with her husband.
A German teacher and two of her students from Berlin’s Paula-Fuerst School were killed, according to the city’s mayor.
Three Tunisians were killed, including Olfa Bent Souayah, the mother of a four-year-old boy who remains missing, according to the country’s foreign ministry. Officials there also said that two men, Bilal Labaoui and mechanic Abdelkader Toukabri, were killed.
Two Algerian children and a 70-year-old woman were killed, according to a foreign ministry spokesperson, and a 60-year-old Moroccan named Fatima Charrihi was killed, according to her son Hamza. He told local media that she was a devout Muslim who practiced “real Islam, not that of the terrorists”.
One Russian student, 21-year-old Victoria Savchenko, was killed, according to the foreign ministry in Moscow. Savchenko was on vacatino with a friend, who was injured but not in serious condition. A Ukrainian national was also killed, according to foreign minister Pavlo Klimkin.
Obamas continues with his call to unity: “we cannot give in to fear or turn on each either.”
“We cannot let ourselves be divided by religion because that’s exactly what the terrorists want. We should never do their work for them.”
“We have to be vigilant to defend our security and our freedoms,” he continues. “And all of us, whatever nations we represent here, I think have to step back and reflect on what we’re doing to eliminate this kind of chronic violence.”
Obama then draws the violence in France to the recent shootings in the United States: five police officers killed in Dallas last Friday and two black men killed by police in the days before that shooting.
“It’s been a difficult several weeks here in the Untied States, but the divide that exists is not between races and ethnicities and religion. It is between people that recognize the common humanity of all people, and are willing to build institutions that promote that common humanity, and those who do not.
“Those who would suggest that somebody is less than them because of their tribe or their ethnicity or their color. And those impulses exist in all our countries. And those impulses, when we do not speak out against them and build strong institutions to protect them from those impulses, they can take over. They can be unleashed. …
“Even as we are relentless against terrorists, it’s also worthy for us to recognize that our nations have worked together for security and peace and human dignity around the world.”
The president concludes his remarks by hailing the work of diplomacy, and the common good created in Europe and Latin America through it: “What a contrast to the death and nihilism that terrorists offer.”
President Barack Obama is addressing the attack in Nice, saying Americans and their allies cannot do terrorists’ “work for them” by targeting people for race or religion.
He says he called president François Hollande to offer the US’s full support.
“I know I speak for all of us when I say that these individuals and these networks are an affront to all our humanity,” Obama says. He notes that the attack in Nice killed “people of all faiths, including Muslims”.
Obama. Photograph: Shawn Thew/EPA
“We will not be deterred. We will not relent. We are going to keep taking out Isil,” he continues. “We are going to destroy this vile terrorist organization.”
“And in contrast to these terrorist who only know how to kill and destroy, we’re going to build this fight buy building, by never giving up on diplomacy, by working with partners around the world, including Muslim communities.”
He says that Islam is “a religion that teaches peace and justice and compassion”.
“We will continue to promote political opportunity and democracy so citizens have a say in their future,” he says.
”We will in this fight by staying true to our values, of pluralism and rule of law and diversity and freedoms, like the freedom of religion, freedom of speech and assembly, the very freedoms that the people of Nice were celebrating last night on Bastille Day.”
“On the wake of last night’s attack we’ve heard more suggestions that Muslims in America” be targeted for tests, exclusion and even expulsion, he says, alluding to the calls from Republican Donald Trump and his allies.
“The very suggestion is repugnant and an affront to everything that we stand for as Americans.” Obama says.
French PM: 'probable' but no confirmed terror link
French prime minister Manuel Valls has said that although he cannot confirm the attacker’s motives, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel “is a terrorist probably linked to radical Islam one way or another”.
Valls. Photograph: Nicolas Kovarik/IP3/Getty Images
Still, the prime minister told France 2 he had no doubt that the crime was terrorism. “It is a terrorist act and we shall see what the links there are with terrorist organizations.”
He added that the death toll will probably increase – at last count 52 people remained in critical care, including 25 people on life support. Authorities have so far counted 202 people injured in all.
Valls added a warning that more attacks could follow Lahouaiej-Bouhlel’s example, but that France would not be deterred:“I am convinced we will win the war against terrorism and radical Islam.”
Far more cautious was French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who told broadcaster TF1 that broadcaster TF1 was “not known to intelligence services for activities linked to radical Islam”.
Asked whether he could confirm the a link to jihadism, he said: “No”.
Neighbors of Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel have described the killer as a “frightening man” who kept to himself but showed no signs of radicalization, Reuters reports.
While a history of threats, violence and theft had caused him several run-ins with the law previously, Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Nice resident born in Tunisia, was not on a watch list of French intelligence services as a suspected militant.
He was convicted for the first time in March this year, French justice minister Jean-Jacques Urvoas said. “There was an altercation between him and another driver and he hurled a wooden pallet at the man,” Urvoas told reporters.
As it was his first conviction, Bouhlel was given a six-month suspended sentence and had to contact police once a week, which he did, Urvoas added. He had three children but lived separately from his wife who was taken into police custody on Friday, prosecutor Francois Molins said.
Tunisian security sources told Reuters Bouhlel had last visited M’saken four years ago. They also said they were not aware of Bouhlel holding radical or Islamist views, saying he had a French residence permit for the past 10 years without obtaining French nationality.
Neighbours in the residential neighbourhood in northern Nice where Bouhlel lived said he had a tense personality and did not mingle with others. “I would say he was someone who was pleasing to women,” said neighbour Hanan, standing in the lobby of the apartment building where Bouhlel lived. “But he was frightening. He didn’t have a frightening face, but ... a look. He would stare at the children a lot,” he added.
A former neighbour in Bouhlel’s hometown of M’saken, about 120km (75 miles) south of Tunis, told Reuters he had left for France in 2005, after getting married, and had worked as a driver there.
His home town of M’saken is about 10 km (six miles) outside the coastal city of Sousse, where a gunman killed 38 people, mostly British holidaymakers, on a beach a year ago.
Relatives and neighbours in Msaken said Bouhlel was sporty and had shown no sign of being radicalised, including when he last returned for the wedding of a sister four years ago.
Bouhlel’s brother Jabeur said he still doubted whether his sibling was the attacker. “Why would my brother do something like this?” he told Reuters, adding: “We’ve been calling him since yesterday evening but he’s not responding.”
Earnest says the US will give the “strongest support” to France and the investigation into the attack.
“There are significant capabilities that we have to support them and obviously we will assist them,” he says.
A reporter asks about whether recent terror attacks outside the Middle East have at all changed the White House’s thinking about its strategy in the region – secretary of state John Kerry called Syria the world’s greatest “incubator” for terror earlier this week.
Earnest says the calculus has not changed.
“The ultimate solution is not a military one. We can certainly apply significant military pressure and commit significant military resources,” he says, “but the root cause of all of this has been the failed political leadership of Bashar al-Assad.”
The attack is only going “to energize” international military campaigns against terrorism, he adds. Earnest again qualifies that very little is known about what motivated the killer in Nice.
“Whether or not this person had ties to Isil, the president is committed to making sure we do everything possible to protect the American people.”
A reporter asks again about whether Barack Obama believes the US is at war. “The president has essentially declared that the US is ‘at war’ with terrorist organizations such as Isil.”
But Earnest stresses that the White House does not consider the US at odds with any religion or civilization. “We are not at war with Islam, we are at war with a terrorist organization that attacked us, that perverts Islam to try to win recruitment to its cause.”
He’s again asked about people who are radicalized online, as “it’s very difficult to interrupt, to disrupt, attacks that are plotted and acted by just one person.
“There’s a whole lot more that we need to learn about this incident,” he says.
Earnest: "We're mindful of the risk that is posed by a so-called lone wolf." Doesn't necessarily have links to a terrorist organisation.
The White House spokesman continues to argue that European nations must improve their intelligence sharing and security agencies – although French police have not yet found signs of radicalization in the Nice attack.
“Just to speak bluntly about this, the previous attacks in Paris in November, I think illustrated this vulnerability best,” Earnest says. “The plotters of the attack were in Belgium but the attack was in France.”
He says this “indicates the cross-border nature of this threat”.
Earnest then argues that it’s actually because the US and its allies are winning territory away from Isis in Syria and Iraq that terror attacks have increased outside the Middle East.
“There are some in the White House who are aware of the risks involved in the progress against Isil,” he says, using another name for Islamic State. “We know that there is some evolution in the direction that Isil is giving to potential recruits.”
“In some cases aren’t even directed by Isil but rather are radicalized by viewing their propaganda online.”
He admits: “I can’t speak to the Nice case” because it’s too soon to know what motivated the killer.
Earnest: It's more of a significant threat now, according to some analysts, because of the progress that is being made.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest says that Barack Obama has called François Hollande to “relay his condolences to the people of France on behalf of the American people”.
He adds that “the United States and France have made important progress in enhancing our security relationship” in the last year.
He says the secretary of defense and the office of the director of national intelligence succeeded in working with the French to create a better “information-sharing relationship”.
The president’s top national security adviser, Lisa Monaco, traveled to France and also worked on a new security deal with her counterpart. Earnest does not get into specifics, saying simple that the arrangement will help identify threats and prevent attacks.
“There is certain expertise that the United States has,” he says, and the secretary of homeland security, Jeh Johnson, has shared some of those techniques with French counterparts.
“Information sharing among European countries needs to be enhanced,” he goes on, arguing that this will in turn improve US security.
A reporter asks him about whether Obama believes the US is at war with terrorism. Earnest says that the president has long said that terrorists declared war on the US with the attack of September 11 2001.
“We’ve been at war ever since,” Earnest says. “And we’ve made progress.”
He says that the deaths of top al-Qaida leaders and the recent retreats of Isis are evidence that the US and western nations are succeeding against terrorism. Then he turns it to Congress, which has not yet passed a resolution – though not a declaration of war – that would sanction increased military action against Isis and other groups.
“This is the worst possible time for leaders or American leaders to suggest that Americans should start turning on each other. That’s exactly what the terrorists want us to do.”
Earnest: "We're still waiting on Congress to pass a resolution to authorise the use of military force against Isil."
Hours after the attack, parents were still looking for their children at the hospital in Nice’s Promenade des Anglais on Friday afternoon, my colleague Angelique Chrisafis reports from the city.
The worst thing was the sheer number of children coming in, the nature of their injuries – serious head trauma and broken limbs – and the emotion felt by the children and their families,” said Frederic Sola, a paediatric orthopaedic surgeon who worked in the hospital emergency room through the night. “The children were physically very injured but also emotionally very hurt.”
Some relatives were in such shock they were unable to talk. “The psychologists have heard terrible things, there are awful stories that children are telling,” said Stéphanie Simpson, head of the hospital’s communications team.
She said 39 people hit in the attacks had been brought to the children’s emergency department. A total of 30 children were treated at the hospital after the attack – the youngest only a few months old and the oldest was 18. Two children died in the night after being admitted. Several children were still in intensive care on Friday.
The emotion on the Fondation Lenval emergency ward was heightened by the fact that the six-storey children’s hospital – with its vast airy atrium, kite mosaic, and teddy bear frescoes on a corridor wall – is located right on the promenade where the attack took place. The suspect, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, had passed the hospital as he set out to drive at high speed into the crowd of Bastille Day revellers.
“It happened so close to the hospital that the emotion is very strong,” said Simpson. She herself had been at the fireworks display with her 10-year-old son and had posted pictures on Facebook of him grinning in front of blue and red fireworks exploding in the sky 20 minutes before the attack.
She left 15 minutes before the truck struck because she had spotted a drop of rain falling on her phone while she was taking the photos, and felt it was getting a bit chilly. “There were so many families there – children and grandparents – and many of them had been picnicking on the beach,” she said.
Barack Obama has ordered the White House and all public buildings and military stations to fly the flag at half-staff in respect of the Nice victims, as people around France plan vigils in mourning of the dead.
The AP reports on those plans, and on families’ efforts to find survivors.
Different parts of France have planned vigils and rallies in mourning at the scores who lost their lives and defiance against the driver who took them.
Avignon mayor Cécile Helle is calling for a large rally Friday in front of the city hall, with other smaller gatherings and vigils planned the same day and over the weekend in towns such as Poitiers, Le Creusot and Pau.
With some people still searching for news of their loved ones after the Nice truck attack, a Facebook site called “SOS Nice” has begun to attract posts from people hoping to be reunited with missing family members.
The site was quickly filling up with photos, appeals and in some cases good news.
