Huge crowd lines seafront of Riviera city for minute’s silence on third day of national mourning

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Manuel Valls, the French prime minister, has been booed before and after a minute’s silence in Nice for the victims of the Bastille Day truck attack.

There were shouts of “Murderers!” and “Resign!” as Valls and two other ministers left the seafront, where a huge crowd gathered to remember the 84 people mown down by the truck driver, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel. There were also placards in the crowd calling for the French president, François Hollande, to resign.

The incident highlighted how three days of national mourning have been overshadowed by an intensifying debate about whether the government has done enough to respond to terrorism.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Manuel Valls (centre) observes a minute’s silence on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice on Monday. Photograph: Valery Hache/AFP/Getty Images

Earlier, the French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said no links had been established between Islamic State and Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a 31-year-old from Tunisia.

He suggested to France’s RTL radio that the attacker was radicalised too quickly to be picked up by the French authorities.“We cannot exclude that an unbalanced and very violent individual [has been] through a rapid radicalisation, committed to this absolutely despicable crime,” he said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, Photograph: Matthieu Alexandre/AFP/Getty

On Saturday, Isis claimed responsibility for inspiring the attack, and said Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was one of its followers. But Cazeneuve said links between the attacker and “terrorist networks … have not yet been established by the investigation”.

Six people are being detained in connection with the attack, including a 38-year-old Albanian suspected of providing Lahouaiej-Bouhlel with a pistol he used to fire at police.

Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was shot dead after deliberately driving a 19-tonne truck through a crowd of people at a Bastille Day firework display on Nice seafront.

The attack comes eight months after Isis terrorists killed 130 people across Paris, and 18 months after three days of terror at the Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Jewish supermarket left 17 dead.

We in France must face terrorism without losing our soul | Nathalie Goulet Read more

The former president and main opposition leader, Nicolas Sarkozy, said: “Everything that should have been done the past 18 months was not done. We are at war, outright war. So I will use strong words: it will be us or them.”

Hours after the attack, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right Front National, said France had done “absolutely nothing” to counter Islamic extremists. She also called for a war against Islamic fundamentalism and said Cazeneuve should resign.

Cazeneuve said such remarks were a “shameful” breach of the three-day period of national mourning. Without naming Sarkozy or Le Pen, he said: “Certain members of the political class have not respected the mourning period. Arguments broke out right away, which personally saddens and shocks me.”



The government has sought to fend off criticism by claiming that security at the Bastille Day event was high.

Last week, a French parliamentary inquiry criticised numerous failings by the intelligence services following jihadi assaults in January and November last year.

Over the weekend it emerged that Lahouaiej-Bouhlel took pictures of himself at the wheel of the truck before the attack and shared them by text message. More than 200 investigators are working on identifying the recipients of the messages.

French investigators are also looking at the level of preparation undertaken by Lahouaiej-Bouhlel after it emerged that he was seen by CCTV cameras on Nice’s Promenade des Anglais twice in the two days before the attack.

At least 10 children were among the dead, as well as tourists from Ukraine, Switzerland, and Germany. A local Russian association said there were about 10 victims from Russia.

The health minister, Marisol Touraine, said 85 people were still in hospital, including 18 in a critical condition.