Francois Hollande extended the state of emergency in France after the terror attack in Nice.
PARIS: French President Francois Hollande said today that the state of emergency in the country has been extended by three months after an attacker killed 80 people and injured several others in the city of Nice, when he drove a truck into a crowded area.
“French state of emergency has been extended for 3 months,” President Hollande said during an official statement.
An attacker killed 80 people and injured scores when he drove a heavy truck at high speed into a crowd watching Bastille Day fireworks in the French Riviera city of Nice late on Thursday, officials said.
Counter-terrorist investigators were seeking to identify the driver, who a local government official said opened fire before police shot him dead. The official said weapons and grenades were found inside the 25-tonne, unmarked truck.
The attack, which came eight months and a day after Islamic State gunmen and suicide bombers killed 130 people in Paris, appeared so far to be the work of a lone assailant.
Newspaper Nice-Matin quoted unidentified sources as saying the driver was a 31-year-old local of Tunisian origin.
The truck careered for hundreds of metres (yards) along the famed Promenade des Anglais seafront, slamming into spectators watching the fireworks, listening to an orchestra or strolling above the beach towards the grand, century-old Hotel Negresco.
“It’s a scene of horror,” a local member of parliament, Eric Ciotti, told France Info radio, saying the truck had “mown down several hundred people.” Local government leader Christian Estrosi put the death toll at 80. An Interior Ministry spokesman said “several dozen” had died.
Nice-Matin said 42 people were in critical condition and many others injured.
“People went down like ninepins,” Jacques, who runs Le Queenie restaurant on the seafront, told France Info.
“I saw people go down,” bystander Franck Sidoli, who was visibly shocked, told news agency Reuters at the scene. “Then the truck stopped, we were just five metres away. A woman was there, she lost her son. Her son was on the ground, bleeding,”
Nice-Matin posted photographs of the truck, its windshield starred by a score of bullets and its radiator grille destroyed.
Source From : ndtv.com
