Terrorist Attack in Nice, France, Leaves 84 Dead and 202 Injured - The New York Times

Terrorist Attack in Nice, France, Leaves 84 Dead and 202 Injured - The New York Times
7/15/16, 2:42 PM
http://nyti.ms/29V0hjJ
EUROPE
Terrorist Attack in Nice, France, Leaves

84 Dead and 202 Injured
By ALISSA J. RUBIN, LILIA BLAISE, ADAM NOSSITER and AURELIEN BREEDEN
JULY 15,
2016
NICE, France The toll of an attack on a Bastille Day fireworks celebration in the
southern French city of Nice rose on Friday to 84 dead and 202 injured, as the
government identified the assailant as a 31-year-old native of Tunisia, extended a
national state of emergency and absorbed the shock of a third major terrorist
attack in 19 months.
We will not give in to the terrorist threat, Prime Minister Manuel Valls said
Friday morning after a cabinet meeting led by President Franois Hollande. But
Mr. Valls also offered a grim observation for his countrymen: The times have
changed, and France is going to have to live with terrorism.
Starting around 10:45 p.m. Thursday, the attacker mowed down scores of
victims in Nice with a rented 19-ton refrigerated truck before engaging in a
gunfight with three police officers, who pursued him down a storied seaside
promenade before finally killing him.
The Paris prosecutor, Franois Molins, identified the man as Mohamed
Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who was born on Jan. 3, 1985, and raised in Msaken, a town in
northeastern Tunisia.
The police searched two locations in Nice on Friday, including a home with
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Mr. Bouhlels name outside it, and workers in hazardous-materials suits searched a
truck, one much smaller than the one used in the attack. His ex-wife was held for
questioning.
No organized group has claimed responsibility for the attack, although online
accounts associated with the Islamic State and Al Qaeda have cheered it.
Mr. Bouhlel had a history of petty crime, including theft, going back to 2010,
and he received a six-month suspended sentence in March for assaulting a driver
during an altercation in January.
However, he is completely unknown by intelligence services, both at the
national and local levels, Mr. Molins said. He has never been in any database or
been flagged for radicalization.
Mr. Bouhlel rented the truck on Monday from a company in Saint-Laurent-duVar, a town about six miles east of Nice, near the citys airport, and then parked it
in the Auriol neighborhood of eastern Nice.
At 9:34 p.m. on Thursday, according to surveillance footage, Mr. Bouhlel
arrived by bicycle in Auriol and entered the truck. He then drove it westward,
arriving at 10:30 in the Magnan neighborhood, north of the Promenade des
Anglais, a famous seaside boulevard.
His deadly rampage began around 15 minutes later, when he drove the truck
south and then turned onto the promenade, which was packed with spectators
watching the end of the Bastille Day fireworks.
Mr. Bouhlel initially mowed down two people and then continued driving for
1.1 miles eastward, running over people left and right. Outside the Negresco Hotel,
Mr. Bouhlel fired at three police officers; they returned fire, and then pursued him
for about a thousand feet. They shot and killed him outside a Hyatt hotel and
casino.
Mr. Bouhlel was found dead in the passenger seat. In the trucks cabin, police
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found an automatic 7.65 mm pistol, a cartridge clip, and several cartridges. They
also found a fake automatic pistol; two fake assault rifles, a Kalashnikov and an M16; a nonfunctioning grenade; and a mobile phone and documents.
The 84 dead included 10 children and teenagers, Mr. Molins said. Among the
victims were two German students and their teacher; two Americans; two
Tunisians, and one Russian. Of the 202 people wounded, 52 had serious injuries
and 25 were in intensive care, Mr. Molins said.
Officials canceled festivities in Nice, a city of 340,000, including a five-day jazz
festival and a concert on Friday night by Rihanna.
There are many children, young children who had come to watch fireworks
with their family, to have joy, to share happiness, delight, amazement, and who
were struck, struck to death, merely to satisfy the cruelty of an individual and
maybe of a group, Mr. Hollande said, flanked by Mr. Valls and Health Minister
Marisol Touraine, after meeting with victims and medical workers at the Pasteur
Hospital in Nice.
Mr. Hollande said the victims were physically and psychologically scarred.
Many told me that they had no recollection of what might have caused their
wounds, he said. However, they remember the bodies that were torn to shreds
right in front of their eyes.
Despite mounting criticism over Frances efforts to prevent terrorism attacks,
Mr. Hollande praised French security forces, saying they had taken all necessary
measures so that this fireworks show might be as protected as possible as had
been the case during the European Championship soccer tournament.
Why Nice? Mr. Hollande asked. Because it is a city that is known
worldwide, one of the most beautiful cities on the planet, he said. Why on the
14th of July? Because it is a celebration of freedom. It was, therefore, indeed to
affect France that the individual committed this terrorist attack.
Hours before the carnage in Nice, Mr. Hollande had said that a state of
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emergency put in place after the Nov. 13 attacks in and around Paris would end
soon. The government will now seek to extend the state of emergency for three
months.
As France announced three days of national mourning, starting on Saturday,
world leaders from Pope Francis and President Obama to Chancellor Angela
Merkel of Germany and Britains new prime minister, Theresa May expressed
sympathy and outrage.
It was a sadly familiar ritual for France, where a total of 147 people were killed
in terrorist attacks in and around Paris in January and November of last year, and
it raised new questions throughout the world about the ability of extremists to sow
terror.
The internet reverberated with calls for prayer for victims of attacks in
Brussels; Istanbul; Orlando, Fla.; Baghdad; and other cities struck by mass
terrorism attributed to Islamist extremists this year.
The horror, the horror has, once again, hit France, Mr. Hollande told the
nation early Friday morning before leaving for Nice.
France has been struck on the day of her national holiday, he said. Human
rights are denied by fanatics, and France is clearly their target.
The attacks could add to the political problems facing Mr. Hollande, who is
expected to seek a second five-year term next year even though he is deeply
unpopular. On Friday, criticisms of the governments seeming inability to prevent
attacks began to emerge.
Alain Jupp, a former prime minister and one of the main candidates in the
center-right primary for next years presidential election, told RTL radio Friday
morning that if all the means had been taken, this tragedy would not have
occurred.
Mr. Jupp called for better coordination among Frances intelligence agencies,
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as a parliamentary inquiry recommended this month.

Georges Fenech, a center-right lawmaker who presided over the parliamentary
inquiry, said on Twitter early Friday that the attack a predictable tragedy.
Two of the main measures Mr. Hollande announced on Friday extending
the state of emergency and maintaining military patrols around the country at a
high level have been deemed of limited use in thwarting attacks, according to the
parliamentary inquiry. The group called for the merging of some of Frances
multiple intelligence agencies and the creation of a national coordinating body like
the National Counterterrorism Center that the United States established after the
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
I dont want to hear about national unity, Mr. Fenech told the news channel
iTl on Friday. Today, it is a duty to talk to the French people, to tell them that
our country is not equipped against Islamist terrorism.
I am saying it very clearly, whatever the political cost, he said.
Christian Estrosi, the president of the Provence-Alpes-Cte dAzur region,
which includes Nice, expressed outrage, sympathy and frustration in an interview
with BFM-TV on Friday morning, pointedly noting the attacks in France last year,
as well as the ones in March in Brussels.
Questions are raised, he said. As I try to comfort the families, I also try to
contain my anger, I cant hide to you that I feel a deep anger. How is it possible in
our country that after everyone said there was a state of emergency, a state of war,
we forget it, after Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan. After the Bataclan, we forgot,
and there was Brussels. After Brussels, we forgot, and there was Nice, so there are
questions that need to be answered.
Mr. Estrosi said that the families needed time to mourn, and that it was our
duty to support them. But he also asked how it was possible that the attack had
apparently been able to breach security, and he said he expected an answer from
Bernard Cazeneuve, the interior minister.
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I dont want to hear the usual we are going to have an investigative

commission, he said.
The Nice attack took place less than a week after the end of the European
soccer tournament. France had hosted the tournament, and the entire country had
been on high alert.
With tens of thousands of people gathered at stadiums and in designated fan
zones during the games, the police and private security forces took extraordinary
measures to try to secure the sites.
Some criticism also came from social media, where commentators said that a
government app, set up to post alerts in case of emergencies, and unveiled before
the tournament, had been too slow to send out a notification about the attack.
The use of a large commercial truck as the principal weapon of death also
raised new questions about how to prevent such attacks.
Witnesses to the Nice attack described scene of mayhem.
We were enjoying the celebrations when we suddenly saw people running
everywhere and tables being pushed down by the movement of panic, said
Daphn Burand, 15, who was at a bar near the beach to watch the fireworks.
No one explained to us what was happening, and I heard some gunshots not
very far away, she said. I waited at the bar for more information because I
thought it was a false alert. But then, people were still running.
Another witness, Raja el-Kamel, 43, said the attack seemed, at first, as if it
might have been the act of a drunken driver.
There was a white truck that was advancing slowly, Ms. Kamel said. Then it
started to plow into the crowd, zigzagging and crushing people. I could not believe
it.
She added: I was looking on my right, and there were bodies on the ground. I
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was looking on my left, there were also many bodies on the ground. It was a
massacre.
Jolle Nouvel, 60, a retired diplomat who has been living in Nice for 15 years,
said she saw the trucks driver wielding a gun in his left hand, and shooting
through the trucks window at the police and at the crowd.
The truck was ramming over everything and everyone and bodies were
thrown in the air like bowling pins, she said in a phone interview, estimating that
she heard about 50 shots fired.
I saw a man with his 13-year-old girl who had been crushed to death and he
was cradling her in his arms, Ms. Nouvel said. Everyone was screaming. The
truck came within 50 centimeters of me. I was wearing a white dress and it was
soon stained with others blood. It took about two minutes for the truck to travel
two kilometers. It was a carnage.
Ms. Nouvel said she was flabbergasted that a truck was able to gain access to a
crowd of tens of thousands of people on Bastille Day.
I am shocked at the French governments failure in the face of jihadists, she
said. We have no security. The government is just not up to it. She said she feared
an anti-Muslim backlash. I am simply devastated, she said.
Alissa Rubin and Lilia Blaise reported from Nice, and Adam Nossiter and Aurelien
Breeden from Paris. Reporting was contributed by Andrew Higgins from Nice; Liz
Alderman and Benot Morenne from Paris; Dan Bilefsky, Sewell Chan and Kimiko de
Freytas-Tamura from London; Rukmini Callimachi and Rick Gladstone from New York;
Eric Schmitt from Washington; and Farah Samti from Tunis.
A version of this article appears in print on July 15, 2016, on page A1 of the New York edition.
2016 The New York Times Company
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Terrorist Attack in Nice, France, Leaves 84 Dead and 202 Injured - The New York Times

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Terrorist Attack in Nice, France, Leaves 84 Dead and 202 Injured - The New York Times

Terrorist Attack in Nice, France, Leaves

as a parliamentary inquiry recommended this month.

I dont want to hear the usual we are going to have an investigative

2016 The New York Times Company

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