Hollande seeks to defuse row over security

French President Francois Hollande yesterday sought to defuse a row over allegations his government tried to alter a security report after the Bastille Day massacre in Nice.

A probe into the claim should be allowed to run its course, Hollande said, declaring the truth would be established “(by) the law and no one else.”

“Truth and transparency are essential in a democracy,” he added. At the centre of the storm is Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, whom rightwingers accuse of security failings after France suffered its third major terror attack in 18 months.

Eighty-four people were killed when a truck driven by a 31-year-old Tunisian ploughed through a holiday crowd on the Nice seafront on July 14.

Pressure on Cazeneuve intensified when a local police officer, Sandra Bertin, accused his ministry of trying to bully her into altering a report on police deployment on the night of the attack.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls waded into the affair yesterday, telling French TV the row was “purely political and aimed at destabilising the government.”

While “obviously we need the truth”, the row should stop, he said, defending Cazeneuve as “a man of integrity, a statesman, and a great interior minister.”

A national police report into the bloodbath had said Mohammad Lahouaiej Bouhlel forced his lorry onto the sidewalk to avoid a police barrier.

But Bertin, who was in charge of the video surveillance system in Nice on the night of the massacre, said on Sunday she could not see a police presence on the security camera system. Bertin said she had been “literally harassed the entire time” that she wrote the report.