Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - Live
Terror strikes
31-year-old French-Tunisian man drives truck through crowd celebrating national day in Nice
NICE: France extended a national state of emergency and vowed to strengthen its fight against terrorism as the country absorbed the shock of a French-Tunisian man driving a truck at high speed through Bastille Day revellers on Thursday, killing at least 84 people and injuring scores.
Thirty one-year-old Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel ploughed a 19-tonne truck for two kilometres through the crowd before he was shot dead by policemen, the third major terrorist attack in 19 months in France.
Nice’s palm-lined Promenade des Anglais was left strewn with bodies as hundreds fled in terror. In a video viewed more than 4,500 times on Facebook, a trembling witness, Tarubi Wahid Mosta, recounted the horror on the promenade.
“I almost stepped on a corpse, it was horrible. It looked like a battlefield,” he said.
He took photographs of an abandoned doll and pushchair and described the sense of helplessness faced with the carnage.
No group claimed the gruesome attack, which left mangled bodies in pools of blood on the Riviera. Mobile phone footage showed the truck initially moving at slow speed before the guntoting driver sped up and began mowing down people.
Hollande, who declared the incident a “terrorist” attack, said France will continue “striking those who attack us on our own soil”. He added: “We will further strengthen our actions in Syria and Iraq.”
The attack, on the day France marks the 1789 revolutionary storming of Bastille prison in Paris, was an assault on liberty by fanatics who despised human rights, he said.
Hollande also said in a predawn address he would call up thousands of military and police reservists to relieve forces worn out by enforcing a state of emergency begun in November after Islamic State suicide bombers struck Paris and killed 130 people.
Only hours earlier, he had announced the emergency would be lifted by the end of July. Following the attack, he said it would be extended by another three months.