As Nice wakes up the morning after 84 people were killed by a lorry driver, eyewitness accounts of the horrific events are beginning to circulate.
People caught up in Thursday night’s tragic events in Nice, where a lorry was driven through the city’s crowded promenade as people gathered to celebrate Bastille Day, have been sharing the accounts to the worldwide media.
One man, Wassim Bouhel, told the French television station iTele how his wife had been killed just a metre from him.
“It was like hallucinating,” he said.
“(The lorry) zigzagged – you had no idea where it was going. My wife … a metre away … she was dead. The lorry ripped through everything … poles, trees. We have never seen anything like it. Some people were hanging on the door and tried to stop it.”
Lucy Nesbitt-Comaskey – visiting Nice for a few days with a friend – told Sky News: “It was shocking, it was devastating and I cannot believe that I have come over here for a few days and I have got mixed up in something so tragic.
“It was just awful. I said to my friend ‘This doesn’t sound like fireworks, it sounds like Beirut when it’s under fire’.
“All of a sudden people were screaming in the streets and running into all the restaurants. All the restaurants were open and people were coming. We were just sitting there and everyone came into our restaurant and the owners were saying ‘Please don’t go anywhere, come in, come in’.”
Eric Drattell told RT.com: “The fireworks went off and they were terrific and were just in the process of paying our dinner bill and all of a sudden we heard the puff-puff-puff, my wife recognised that it is gunfire and we started running for the shelter.
“We were told [by the police] to stay in the shelter, about a hundred or so people are crowded down here and the people started drifting toward the entrance about ten minutes ago and the police told everybody to get back.
“Promenade des Anglais was closed to vehicles, I think at 2 or 3 p.m. this afternoon so it’s surprising that the vehicle even gone on,” he added.
