PARIS — A truck plowed into a large crowd watching the annual Bastille Day fireworks on the promenade in Nice on Thursday night, and a number of people were feared dead. There was no official confirmation of the number of casualties, but witnesses reported hearing gunshots.
A Twitter message from Christian Estrosi, the deputy mayor of Nice, said that there might have been “tens of deaths” but he did not provide exact numbers or other details. It was not clear what motivated the driver to veer into into the crowd.
Officials asked people to stay indoors.
Conflicting accounts of the deaths and injuries emerged from multiple sources after the episode, with many reporting high numbers of casualties.
The sub-prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes department, Sébastien Humbert, told the French network BFMTV: “There are several dozen dead. The total is very high, thirty dead. Maybe 100 wounded. There was a truck that drove into the crowd, over a very long distance. There were shots. The driver was shot. This is on a big scale.”
Daphne Burandé, 15, who was at a bar near the beach to watch the fireworks, said: “We were enjoying the celebrations when we suddenly saw people running everywhere and tables being pushed down by the movement of panic.”
“No one explained to us what was happening and I heard some gunshots not very far away,” she said. “I waited at the bar for more information because I thought it was a false alert. But then, people were still running.”
France has been on alert for a terrorist attack for months, and officials have warned repeatedly that another attack is likely. Last November, attacks in and around Paris killed 130 people.
On Twitter, a woman who said her terrace overlooked the promenade where the episode unfolded reported hearing gunfire.
Several witnesses spoke on iTele, a French television station. A man who gave his name as Michel, working at the Voilier Plage restaurant in front of the Promenade des Anglais, said that around 10:30 pm a large white truck drove into a crowd that had gathered near the beach to watch Bastille Day fireworks, apparently killing dozens of people. “A huge number of people started running, then there was a lot of gunfire,” he said. The police arrived on the scene and engaged in a shootout with the two occupants of the truck.
Another witness who owns a restaurant nearby, whom iTele did not identify, said that when the truck plowed into the crowd, it “crushed everyone in its path.” Then two men got out of the truck “and started shooting into the crowd, about 50 shots,” the witness said.
French television showed footage of a panicked crowd running from the scene. On Twitter, witnesses posted grim photos of bodies lying in a pile on the asphalt.
The Prefecture of Police in Nice said that the driver had been neutralized.
