President Obama Calls Attack On Nice ‘Appalling,’ ‘Sickening’

At least 84 people were killed, including 10 children, yesterday when a man drove a truck for two kilometres through a crowd that had congregated to watch fireworks for France’s Bastille Day, the country’s most important holiday.

Neighbors in the residential neighborhood in northern Nice where Bouhlel lived said he had a tense personality and did not mingle with others.

So far no organisation has claimed responsibility for the attack and authorities have urged caution on linking Bouhlel to so-called Islamic State.

The state of emergency had been due to be scaled back but instead was extended another three months.

Additionally, Hollande said the government had made a decision to draw upon operational reserves, including army veterans and former members of the gendarmerie “to come and help relieve the pressure on the police and gendarmes”.

Hollande said the attack was “undeniably terrorist in nature”, but prosecutors said the 31-year-old driver who lived in Nice wasn’t known to intelligence services.

People walk Friday at the site where a truck drove into a crowd in the French Riviera town of Nice.

He said he tried to help the wounded, including a woman with catastrophic injuries. “I won’t forget the look of this policewoman who intercepted the killer”, Ciotti said. The dead included at least 10 children.

Of the injured, 52 were in critical condition, and 25 were in a coma, Molins said.

Jacques, who runs Le Queenie restaurant on the seafront, told the station: “People went down like ninepins”. Two Scots were among the dozens listed as missing.

Police said he fired three shots at them before they returned fire, eventually killing him and bringing the vehicle to a stop. “The Windsor Islamic Council therefore condemns this and all terrorist attacks in the strongest terms possible, and calls on all Muslims to stand firm against and expose these evil doers”.

Hollande’s government, whose popularity is plumbing record lows in polls, has been buffeted by allegations that France’s intelligence services have failed to get a handle on the country’s jihadist threat.

France would, nonetheless, continue its air operations against Islamic States in Syria and Iraq.

“France was hit on its National Day, 14 July, the symbol of freedom”, Hollande said in his speech, “because human rights are denied by the fanatics, and because France is obviously their target”.

Bouhlel’s attack was stopped thanks to a handful of police who pursued the truck on foot and, possibly, by motorcycle as he plowed through the first crowds outside the Negresso.

“The motorcyclist attempted to overtake the truck and even tried to open the driver’s door, but he fell and ended up under the wheels of the truck”.

Comfort of strangers in time of tragedy: Hours after the attack, the dead still lay scattered where they fell across the promenade. Crowds flee in panic, taking shelter in shops, hotels or leaping off the elevated pavement onto the beach below. The truck bore down toward English tourist Simon Coates, who had just lost his wife Amanda in the chaos.

“It was frightful. I saw a father with his two-year-old son in his arms”.

After midday reporters were told by police to move away from a white Volvo delivery van near the home because they feared it might be holding explosives. I leapt one way.

“I don’t think there was a radicalisation issue, I think there was psychiatric problem”, he added. Police found various weapons, including fake guns, in the vehicle.