A crowd numbering about 80 met their untimely death on Thursday while watching Bastille Day fireworks in the French Riviera city of Nice while a “terrorist”
gunman drove a heavy truck at high speed into the innocent crowd. Several others were also injured.
France is filled with sadness by this new tragedy,” said President Francois Hollande.
According to the President, the lethal attack on the southern city of Nice was clearly a ‘terrorist’ assault. He stated further that the state of emergency imposed since a previous attack on Paris last November would be extended for another three months.
Speaking after an emergency meeting in the early hours of Friday morning, Hollande said: “There’s no denying the terrorist nature of this attack of yet again the most extreme form of violence,” the French leader said in a national television address at 4 a.m. (0200 GMT), about five or six hours after the carnage in Nice.
“We are in a war with terrorists who want to hurt us at all costs,” , Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told journalists hours after an attack that took place when people were watching a fireworks display to mark the country’s Bastille Day national holiday.
Neither he nor other political leaders who spoke publicly in the hours after the attack confirmed media reports that the assailant was a Nice resident of Tunisian origin.