Survivors of the 2016 Bastille day attack in Nice have described how the seafront was turned into a “war zone” when a gunman drove a heavy truck at high speed into the crowd gathered to watch fireworks in the French Riviera city, reports The Guardian.
“It was war, people were crushed, I saw a woman being run down with a baby in her arms,” said Abdallah Kebaïer, a retired maintenance worker, who was catapulted into the air by the truck and suffered seven broken ribs, head trauma and injuries to his liver and pancreas.
Giving evidence at a trial of seven men and one woman, Kebaïer, 67, described the sense of confusion and panic as thousands who had gathered to watch fireworks on the seafront boulevard lined with palm trees noticed a heavy truck deliberately driving into the crowd, zigzagging and accelerating towards people for 2km along the esplanade.
The attack, which killed 86 people and injured more than 400, was the second most deadly massacre in peacetime France. It came eight months after the Paris attacks on bars, restaurants, the national stadium and Bataclan concert hall that killed 130 people and were claimed by Islamic State.
Kebaïer, whose daughter was getting married that week, watched the fireworks display with his brother and cousin. They were crossing the promenade when the truck hit. “I found myself lying facedown on the ground, 100 metres from the truck,” he said.
Kebaïer’s brother, Taoufik, a former electrician, told the court: “There was a deafening noise. I ran, I fell, I was sandwiched in the middle of corpses, bodies, I’m not sure if they were dead or alive … I couldn’t understand how my brother was thrown so far away when he’d been walking beside me.” He described the effect on the crowded seafront: “It was like a wheat field, mowed down.”
Six years on, the brothers still have flashbacks of the dead strewn around them.
The truck driver, 31-year-old Tunisian-born Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, was shot dead by police at the end of four minutes’ drive as he began firing a semi-automatic weapon from the truck’s cab.