Signs of normalcy returning to Nice’s coast after Bastille Day carnage

Joggers, cyclists and sunseekers are back on Nice’s famed Riviera coast, a further sign of normal life returning on the Promenade des Anglais where dozens were killed in last week’s Bastille Day truck attack.

Under a blazing sun, there were few visible reminders of the carnage on Tuesday, save for a handful of flags flying at half staff and a number of armed soldiers patrolling the promenade.

Some of Nice’s beachside restaurants were reopening for business, and the final section of the Promenade des Anglais was set to reopen to traffic following three days of official mourning.

On Monday evening, mourners formed a human chain to remove candles, flowers and other mementos honoring the victims of the attack, when Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove through crowds watching fireworks. Rather than dismantling the tributes to the dead, volunteers moved them from the spots where victims fell along the killer’s trajectory to a gazebo in a seaside park.

Eighty-four people were killed in the attack. Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Monday that 59 people were still hospitalized.

Paris prosecutor Francois Molins, who oversees terrorism investigations, said a search of Bouhlel’s computer had found a clear and recent interest in “radical jihadism”, adding that the attack was obviously premeditated though there was no proof Bouhlel was directed by an extremist network.

Internet searches on his computer included Islamic propaganda chants, the terms “horrible deadly accidents”, and the recent attacks against the nightclub in Orlando, Florida, police officers in Dallas, and the killing of two police officials in Magnanville, outside of Paris.

Meanwhile, many Muslims feel their community is being unfairly blamed for the Bastille Day attack, and fear discrimination and social divisions will grow in its wake.

France is home to Europe’s largest Muslim minority. In a sign of the growing feeling of alienation among many Muslims in Ariane and elsewhere, Younis, a roof-builder born to Moroccan immigrants, said the whole community was blamed “every time something happens in France, in Europe”.

“Once the problem was racial discrimination, now it’s religious discrimination,” said Younis, who declined to give his surname, sitting at the entrance to a dreary eight-storey block of flats opposite the suburb’s small mosque.