France debates whether Nice truck attack should have been stopped

How did lone driver do this in a state of heightened security?

Returning home after an abortive trip to find some ice cream late Thursday evening, Mario Aufiero, a French retiree, waited patiently on the sidewalk as a big truck lumbered down the short street he needed to cross to get to his apartment building just off the Promenade des Anglais.

The truck, he said, displayed no unusual menace but upset him all the same as heavy vehicles are supposed to be banned from the sedate residential area at that hour. Moreover, it was moving in the wrong direction down the one-way street outside his apartment.

“There was nothing I could do, so I went home to bed,” Aufiero recalled.

The deeply uncomfortable question now confronting French leaders and the country’s security apparatus, however, is whether they, too, dozed off that night.

Moments after Auferio got home, the driver of the truck he had seen turned it into a killing machine. The truck ran over scores of people as it barreled down the Promenade des Anglais for more than a mile before police officers finally stopped it by shooting to death the driver, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian.

As investigators try to piece together what drove Lahouaiej Bouhlel to such extreme and random violence, many people in Nice and around the world are asking how, in a country that has been under a state of emergency for 18 months, a lone driver could so easily flout elementary traffic rules and then race unimpeded through throngs of people who had gathered to watch a Bastille Day fireworks display.

As in previous years, security forces, worried about a possible terrorist attack on France’s national day, had set up barriers to block traffic on the Promenade des Anglais, a crescent-shaped boulevard that stretches eastward from the city’s airport to its old port. But the barriers, crowd-control devices made of hollow metal tubes, started far to the east of where Lahouaiej Bouhlel entered the boulevard. The number of police officers on duty that night was more than usual, but nearly all were concentrated in the sealed-off area by the old port, where most people traditionally gather to watch the fireworks.

This left Lahouaiej Bouhlel more than a mile of open road on which to crush revelers who had decided to stay outside the heavily guarded spectator zone — and build up speed before he reached the first police barriers near the point where the seaside promenade joins the Boulevard Gambetta. Such was the 19-ton truck’s speed that when it first encountered any obstruction by police, “it would have required a wall of concrete” to stop it, Anthony Borré, an official in the regional government, told local television.

French leaders, including President Francois Hollande, who visited Nice on Friday, repeatedly praised security services for swiftly stopping the truck once they encountered it. Indeed, the truck advanced only 500 or so yards after smashing through the barriers near Boulevard Gambetta. But this was only a short part of Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s long and murderous drive.

“Why was he allowed to drive so far without anyone bothering him?” asked Pierre Roux, who, from his balcony, watched the truck plow through the crowd outside his apartment. “This is a terrible screw-up.”