HOLLANDE BOOED AS FRANCE REELS ONCE AGAIN
As new details emerged Friday about the Tunisian man who drove a truck through crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, killing 84 people and wounding 202 others, French leaders extended a state of emergency imposed after the Nov. 13 Paris attacks and vowed to deploy thousands of police reservists on the streets.
French officials called it an undeniable act of terror, but it wasn’t clear if the 31-year-old delivery driver blamed for the carnage had extremist ties.
The country is still reeling from the Nov. 13 attacks, which killed 130 people at the Bataclan concert hall, Paris restaurants and cafés, and the national stadium, and a separate January 2015 in Paris attack that targeted journalists at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and Jews at a kosher supermarket.
Both attacks were claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and French President François Hollande was booed in Nice on Friday by people who blamed government authorities for failing to enforce sufficient security measures.
Thursday night’s massacre of pedestrians leaving a fireworks display along the southern city’s famed boulevard ended only after police killed the armed attacker in a hail of bullets.
Video shot by witnesses shows the truck coming under police gunfire as it drives through an intersection along the palm tree-lined Promenade des Anglais, which had been turned into a pedestrian walkway for the national day celebrations. Crowds flee in panic, taking shelter in shops, hotels or leaping off the elevated pavement onto the beach below. Police finally surround the stationary truck and fatally shoot its driver.
Police identified the attacker as Mohamed Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Nice resident, and said he had drawn a gun on them. The truck’s front windshield was riddled with bullets, Bouhlel’s body slumped inside.
Chief prosecutor François Molins said police risked their own lives trying to stop the truck as it travelled two kilometres down the promenade. Flags were lowered to half-staff in Nice, Paris, Brussels and many capitals across Europe. Hollande announced a three-month extension to the state of emergency imposed after the Nov. 13 attacks and the government declared three days of national mourning to begin Saturday.
“Terrorism is a threat that weighs heavily upon France and will continue to weigh for a long time,” Prime Minister Manuel Valls said. “We are facing a war that terrorism has brought to us. The goal of terrorists is to instil fear and panic. And France is a great country, and a great democracy, that will not allow itself to be destabilized.”
But Hollande faced public anger after travelling to Nice, 690 kilometres south of Paris, to offer his condolences. He visited wounded people in two hospitals, including one where officials had treated about 50 children and teenagers for a wide range of injuries.
Molins said 52 of the 202 wounded in the attack remained in critical condition Friday night, 25 of them on life support. Among the dead, officials said, were 10 children.
Hollande and Christian Estrosi, the president of Nice’s regional government of Provence Alpes d’Azur, ran a gauntlet of booing crowds as their convoy passed through Nice.
“Mr. Estrosi is from the right. Mr. Hollande from the left. I say it and I say it loud: These two are killers,” said Christelle Hespel, a Nice resident who accused both of overseeing negligent security.
Hollande’s government, whose popularity has plumbed record lows, has recently been buffeted by allegations that France’s intelligence services have failed to get a handle on the country’s jihadist threat. France has known for years that it is a top ISIL target, and it is the biggest source for European recruits for ISIL, with more than 1,000 fighting in Syria or Iraq.
FRANCE IS A GREAT COUNTRY ... THAT WILL NOT ALLOW ITSELF TO BE DESTABILIZED.