Witnesses recall chaos, bloodshed in Nice: ‘Now the Middle East can happen anywhere’
Eyewitnesses won’t easily forget the horror of watching a terrorist plow a truck brimming with explosives into a large crowd in the city of Nice in southern France Thursday night.
A lone terrorist killed at least 84 people and injured hundreds by targeting Bastille Day celebrations near the city’s famous Promenade des Anglais along the Mediterranean Sea, authorities said.
Witnesses recall that thousands had been watching fireworks on the beach before the chaos began.
Nader El Shafei, an Egyptian man vacationing in Nice, said he initially thought the truck swerving into the crowd was an accident and that he tried to get the driver’s attention.
“I was waving to the driver ‘Stop, there’s a girl under the truck,’” Shafei said in an interview with NBC News. “I saw him pick up a phone, I thought, and at this point I still think it’s an accident and then I see he pulls out a gun. It looked like a handgun, a Glock. He pulled it out and I understood something was wrong … and then I see the police shooting him.”
He said that everyone started to run away and that police yelled at him to leave too but he was “just frozen.”
Just minutes before the attack, Shafei said, the thought that a crazy person could inflict harm on the peaceful gathering came into his mind.
“I’m used to all of these actions in the Middle East, but I was never this close to it,” he said. “I said to my friends, ‘Now we can’t go to Europe to escape the Middle East. Now the Middle East can happen anywhere.’”
Dominique Molina, her husband, Tony, and their 14-year-old son saw the terror unfold from the balcony of their hotel. Like Shafei, she said it took a few moments before she realized that the truck had veered into the crowd intentionally.
“I grabbed my son, and I just felt like shielding him and protecting him from seeing that,” she said to CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
“He’s really shaken,” she continued. “People should not see these types of things.”
Molina recalled the truck making “banging sounds” as it sped through the crowd. People started to scream out after the gunfire subsided, and they ran away amid the dead bodies, she said.
“Within a few moments of the gunfire, everything went very quiet, very eerily quiet, and then you started hearing wailing and screaming and crying,” she said.
#nice to understand the horror u have to know what happened just before. Thousands on the beach watching fireworks pic.twitter.com/kcJXDoiUh1
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Molina’s husband said they saw at least 10 dead bodies on the street near their hotel.
“These bodies kind of sat. It was sad, because there were families just laying down, crying next to these bodies,” he told CNN. “Then they had to clear the area out. The bodies sat there covered up.”
Damien Allemand, a reporter for the local Nice Matin newspaper, said that when he first heard shouts and loud noises, he thought perhaps someone who had not mastered fireworks was trying to set them off.
But a split second later, he said, he saw someone driving a huge white truck through the crowded promenade all while firing bullets out the window to maximize the number of people he killed.
“I saw bodies flying like bowling pins in its path. Heard noises, screams that I will never forget. I was paralyzed. I did not move,” Allemand wrote in a post on Medium.
Sheer panic broke out around him. He said he started running with the crowd and heard heartbreaking words while seeking safety, such as “Where is my son?”
According to Allemand, sunbathers were among the first on the scene to help the victims, bringing water to the wounded and towels to stop the flow of blood. But he said he didn’t truly understand the extent of the tragedy until he got on his scooter and drove away — seeing the ambulances arrive and the many bodies strewn across the ground.
“This evening, it was horror,” he said.
Paul Delane, an American at the celebration, said he and his partner were walking toward a DJ set after the fireworks ended. Suddenly, he said, thousands of people started to run away in a single direction, so his partner took his hand and they also started running.
“I had no idea what was going on. The music was so loud, we couldn’t hear anything. I didn’t see a truck, I just heard people running, screaming and crying, and people carrying their children,” Delane told CNN. “I didn’t know if I should hide or continue running. … I wasn’t sure what to do, in that situation. No one knew what was going on. We just knew we had to run for our lives.”
After the attack, President Obama released a statement condemning the attack in the strongest terms on behalf of the American people and offering thoughts and prayers to the families and other loved ones of those killed. He directed his team to stay in touch with French officials and to offer any assistance needed as the attack is investigated, he said.
“We stand in solidarity and partnership with France, our oldest ally, as they respond to and recover from this attack,” Obama said in the statement. “On this Bastille Day, we are reminded of the extraordinary resilience and democratic values that have made France an inspiration to the entire world, and we know that the character of the French Republic will endure long after this devastating and tragic loss of life.”
This marks the third major terrorist attack in France in two years. The Paris offices of the Charlie Hebdo newspaper were targeted on Jan. 7, 2015, and there was a series of coordinated terrorist attacks throughout Paris on Nov. 13, 2015.
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