Nearly 24 hours after a Bastille Day celebration was transformed into a nightmare, “locals and visitors returned to the Promenade des Anglais to lay flowers for the dead and to wonder exactly how, and why, the unthinkable had come to pass,” my colleague Sam Jones reports from the city.
Throughout Friday, impromptu shrines had sprung up along the metal barriers that closed off the promenade. From one hung a tricolor with a black ribbon sewn on to the white central stripe. At another, a picture of Buddha watched over a dozen small candles. Someone had left a cigarette lighter and more nightlights on the ground so others could light candles and offer prayers.
Madame Bourmault, who lives two minutes from the promenade, came to one of the shrines with a bunch of flowers in her hand and tears in her eyes.
“I can’t sleep and I can’t breathe. It’s just horrible,” she said.
“What else can you say?” She had been down by the firework display on Thursday night, and seen a sudden tide of people screaming and running away. “In a fraction of a second, the music stopped and there was a lot of screaming. Everyone was running and no one was helping.”
On Bormault’s mind was a question that many around the world are asking: how had the truck managed to get on to the promenade? “It’s normally closed to traffic,” she said. However, she did not blame the police. “I don’t know what else the police could have done, but I don’t understand how the truck got in.”
She added: “You can’t put a policeman behind everyone - and there area lot of crazy people in this world.”
A memorial in Paris.
A memorial in Paris. Photograph: Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA
Leila Pasini, an Italian tourist from Milan on holiday in Nice, had been on the promenade before the attack but had returned to the flat where she was staying to make sure her dog was OK.
“We left just before the truck came and then I looked out of the window and saw a river of people running and crying. It looked like the apocalypse but I didn’t know what was going on.”
Pasini said she had heard that the truck had been close to the promenade for a long time and that the driver had explained that he was delivering ice.
“I don’t know whether that’s true or not,” she said. “But if it is true, then that’s very serious. Why would a truck be there for so long?”
By nine o’clock last night, life on the Rue de France, which runs close to the promenade, was slowly returning to normal. A few hundred yards from the scene of the atrocity, people walked their dogs and sat eating on restaurant terraces. Past them walked couples carrying flowers and clutching each other’s hands tightly.
Ita Murray and her friend Jackie Ellis, had arrived in Nice from London a few hours before the attack. They had intended to go and watch the fireworks but the day’s traveling had got the better of them and they chose to stay on their balcony.
“About 11, we saw all these youngsters running and screaming,” said Murray. “They were tearing around and we thought it was a prank.”
It wasn’t until nine on Friday morning, when they were awoken by phone calls from their anxious families, that they understood what all the shouting and running had been about. And that their fatigue had been a blessing.
“We were just too tired,” said Ellis. “Otherwise we would have been up
there because there’s always something going on.”