The living held their hands. They knew they were dead, but they would not let them go.
Hours after unspeakable horror was visited on families who had gathered to watch the >Bastille Day fireworks on the seafront in Nice , the dead still lay scattered where they fell across the Promenade des Anglais.
Here and there people sat with them, sometimes alone, sometimes in a little huddles of family and friends. Some had only the comfort of strangers, after the lorry’s murderous passage.
And one victim, a small child who like so many others had been allowed to stay up late to see the fireworks, lay dead on the tarmac with a doll at its side. “You would think you could do something to help by being there,” said actor Tarubi Wahid Mosta, who tried to do what he could in the aftermath of the attack. “But we were useless.”
The >dead remained under sheets as the massive investigation began. “All these families who have already spent a long time at their sides are likely — given the horrible number of the dead — to spent hours on the ground holding the cold hands of bodies dismembered by the truck. You can’t even speak to them or comfort them,” the actor wrote on his Facebook page. “That is the hardest thing, to be useless at such a horrible moment.”
One photograph he posted shows a headscarfed women kneeling over a body. “In the middle of all this is a Muslim family [real Muslims], one of whom did not escape this crazy lorry," he said. "Once again everyone has been touched, whether they were believers or not.”
Outside a Nice hospital a grieving family later told reporters that their mother, a devout Muslim, had been the first of the lorry’s 84 victims. Long after dawn broke some of the victims were still lying on the promenade covered by blue and white sheets as the first of the morning joggers set out along the Bay of Angels.
Motorcyclist tried to stop truck A German journalist who witnessed the attack said he saw a motorcyclist chase the killer truck and try to enter the cabin but fall and end up under the wheels. “I stood on the balcony, right on the Promenade des Anglais, and saw how people celebrated there, and how suddenly a truck drove through the crowd,” Richard Gutjahr, 42, said.
“Surprisingly, he drove very slowly, not fast, he drove slowly and he was chased by a motorcyclist,” recounted Mr. Gutjahr. “The motorcyclist attempted to overtake the truck and even tried to open the driver's door, but he fell and ended up under the wheels of the truck.”
