‘IT WAS A SEA OF PANIC’
As another city in France is rocked by a terrorist atrocity, Grazia’s Jen Paul – who was metres away as the horror unfolded in Nice – gives her heart-wrenching account
PEOPLE WERE RUNNING
everywhere screaming, crying and carrying babies. The sedate streets of Nice were suddenly a sea of panic just outside my car window as I waited in traffic on my way home from a Bastille Day dinner. I’d thought earlier that night about going to see the fireworks on the seafront, but knew getting there would be impossible with so many celebrating there. Seeing the hordes of terrified people surging towards me from the Promenade des Anglais, I realised something had gone horribly wrong.
I was just 10 metres from where a 31-year-old French-tunisian, named locally as Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, plowed a hired refrigerated truck into the crowd last Thursday night. He was travelling over 50kmph – zigzagging down the Promenade des Anglais for 2km, killing 84 people, more than 10 of them children, and leaving scores of others in a critical state.
I heard loud bangs and saw smoke. Helicopters circled overhead and ambulances screamed past. Policemen and soldiers armed with machine guns rushed towards the
seafront. The beautiful seaside town I’ve spent 17 years living nearby was suddenly a dark, scary war zone as the police shot the man – now described as a terrorist – dead as he tried to exit from his lorry with a gun.
As I waited, amid the fear and confusion, I watched people sobbing and helping injured friends down the narrow old town streets. A 13-year-old girl, hyperventilating and wearing only one shoe, pulled open my car door and asked if I could help her. She’d been watching the fireworks with her dad and little sister when they saw the lorry barrelling straight towards them.
She told me how it sent people flying like skittles. Others were crushed under the lorry’s wheels, and there were children lying in pools of blood. One man she’d seen was hysterical – two of his three children had been killed. Everyone was frantically trying to get away in case there were bombs. The girl said she’d seen the terrorist firing shots into the crowd – that’s when she ran. It was only when she turned on to the street and found me that she realised her father and little sister weren’t behind her. We drove away from the chaos and once we’d reached a safe point, called her desperate family. Thankfully they were safe and I arranged to meet them in a quiet place. It was an emotional reunion and the girl’s grief-stricken father told me he thought his eldest daughter might be dead.
At home later, the reality of what had happened sunk in and I started shaking. Friends gathered at my house, and one described being close enough to the lorry to see the manic and excited look in the terrorist’s eye as he rampaged down that street. She described leading her young son through the panic with a T-shirt over his eyes so he couldn’t see the street littered with injured and dying people or the parents lying on the ground wailing next to the bodies of their dead children.
It feels impossible at this point to face up to yet another atrocity on the streets of France – only months after the terror in Paris. The news comes just days after a report identified ‘major failings’ in French intelligence that contributed to the 147 deaths by terrorists last year. But, despite the shock and anger at what happened this Bastille Day, I won’t be leaving France or changing my life. We can’t let the bad guys win. Seeing how many people got together to help each other to safety reassures me that there are many more good people out there than bad.