By mutual agreement, the victims’ associations and the municipality had opted for a tribute without speaking. Seven years later, Nice paid a sober tribute on Friday to the 86 victims of the attack of July 14, 2016, in front of the memorial work L’Ange de la baie, located on the Promenade des Anglais, at the place where the truck of 19 tonnes piloted by Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 30-year-old Tunisian living in Nice, finished his race seven years ago.
This evening of July 14, 2016, nearly 30,000 people gathered on the seaside for the fireworks of the national holiday. More than 400 people were injured before Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel was shot dead by security forces.
After the names of the 86 victims were read, the four Nice victims’ associations laid a common wreath, then imitated by the local and national authorities, before La Marseillaise was sung.
Several local victims’ associations expressed, at the end of the ceremony, their “real concern” about the follow-up that justice will give to the current investigation on the security system put in place that evening.
“Questions about possible malfunctions”
The trial of the accomplices of the author of the attack ended last December with convictions, from two to eighteen years of imprisonment, pronounced against eight people. But the subject of this second case is the offense of “endangering others by manifestly deliberate violation of security obligations”. It concerns the securing, jointly set up by the municipal and prefectural authorities, of the “Prom’Party” organized on the evening of the attack in Nice.
“It is important to understand, and for us to understand is to have the truth. We have questions about possible malfunctions,” said Anne Murris, president of the Memorial of Angels association and mother of Camille, one of the 86 victims of the attack: “Asking for the truth is not accusing , is that we are given answers on the fact that all the provisions had been put in place. »
“We don’t want someone’s head, we want to clarify the shortcomings, and that this will be used in the future to review the regulations on securing large open events,” said Stéphane Erbs, co-president of Promenade. angels, injured by the truck of the terrorist who killed his wife, Rachel, expressing his “real concern about a possible dismissal” in this judicial investigation opened in Nice since 2017.