At least 80 killed in terror attack on Bastille day crowd in Nice
naky
www.diecastingpartsupplier.com
2016-07-19 11:44:00
At least 80 people were killed in the French Riviera city of Nice late on Thursday when a truck driver ploughed into a large crowd gathered for a fireworks show on France’s national holiday.“France has been struck on the day of her national holiday – the 14th of July, Bastille Day – the symbol of liberty, because human rights are denied by fanatics and France is clearly their target,” Fran?ois Hollande, French president, said in an address to the nation.
“The terrorist nature of this attack cannot be denied,” he added, saying that all of France was “under the threat of Islamist terrorism”.Dead and injured victims were scattered along two kilometres of the Promenade des Anglais seafront, local officials said, estimating that another 100 were injured at the Bastille day celebrations. As his interior minister said the death toll had reached 80, Mr Hollande said the dead included several children and as many as 20 of the injured were in a critical condition.
The truck was loaded with grenades and guns, according to Christian Estrosi, president of the Provence-Alpes-C?te-d’Azur region and mayor of Nice until last month.“This is the worst tragedy in the history of Nice,” Mr Estrosi wrote on Twitter. “The driver was behaving in a manner that by all evidence was structured and premeditated,” he told a press conference.
Mr Hollande said he would fly to Nice after a meeting with his defence council on Friday. Bernard Cazeneuve, interior minister, arrived in Nice on Thursday night to help coordinate the response.In a statement, US President Barack Obama condemned “what appears to be a horrific terrorist attack” and said he had directed his team to offer French officials “any assistance that they may need to investigate this attack and bring those responsible to justice.”
“We can’t extend the state of emergency indefinitely, it would make no sense. That would mean we’re no longer a republic with the rule of law applied in all circumstances,” he had told journalists in a traditional Bastille day interview.Officials were cautious about accounts from bystanders that the lone man driving the truck had also opened fire. Police called on people not to propagate rumours that were hampering their work.
One woman told France Info that she and others had fled in terror: “The lorry came zigzagging along the street. We ran into a hotel and hid in the toilets with lots of people.” The Negresco hotel on the Promenade was turned into a makeshift hospital for the wounded.Another woman told the station she was sheltering in a restaurant on the promenade with some 200 people, where things had calmed down about two hours after the incident.
Nice Matin, a regional newspaper, published a photograph of a damaged, long-distance delivery truck, which it said was riddled with bullets, and images of emergency services treating the many injured.