A lawyer took a walk with her mother, friends and a colleague along the boulevard in Nice to celebrate France’s national day. Four young sisters from Poland had spent a day sightseeing. Two Russian students were on summer vacation. And a family from Texas, on vacation with young children, was seeing some of Europe’s classic sights. The bright lights of the crowded boardwalk shone across the bay like a string of stars. Those lights would mark a path of murder and destruction that night of July 14, 2016. Shortly after a fireworks display ended, a truck drove through the crowds for two kilometers (1¼ miles) like an avalanche, hitting person after person. The final death toll was 86, including 15 children and teenagers, while another 450 were injured. Eight people are on trial Monday in a special French terrorism court accused of aiding the attacker, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who left a gruesome trail of mangled and dismembered bodies across 15 city blocks. Bouhlel himself was killed by the police that same night. “It was like a battlefield,” said Jean-Claude Humbler, a survivor and eyewitness to the horrific attack that Thursday. He rushed to the boardwalk to help after hearing desperate screams from people who had been cheering and laughing and dancing on the beach a minute before. “There were people laying on the ground everywhere, some of them still alive, screaming,” Hubler said. As he waited for the ambulances to arrive, he knelt beside a man and a woman as they lay dying on the pavement, in a pool of blood and surrounded by mangled and mangled bodies. “I was holding her hand in her last breath,” Hubler said. Three suspects have been charged with terrorist conspiracy for alleged links to the attacker. Five others face other criminal charges, including for allegedly supplying the gunman with weapons. If convicted, they face five years to life in prison. The verdict is expected in December. Investigators have found no evidence that any of the suspects were directly involved in the killing spree on that hot summer night in 2016. Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian with French residency, was the sole perpetrator and is believed to be solely responsible for the deaths of 86 people, including 33 foreigners from Poland, the United States, Russia, Algeria, Tunisia, Switzerland and elsewhere. Myriam Bellazouz, the lawyer, lived a few blocks from the Nice boardwalk. She was walking with her mother on the night of the attack and was killed. It took friends and colleagues three days of frantic searching around the traumatized city and appeals on social media to find her remains. Only two of the four Chrzanowska sisters, on holiday from Poland, returned home alive. When the 19-metric-ton (21-ton) truck sped through the crowd, one of the students from Moscow, Viktoria Savachenko, was unable to escape in time and was killed. American Sean Copeland, from a town near Austin, Texas, was also killed in the attack along with his 11-year-old son, Brody. Christophe Lyon is the sole survivor of a large French family who had gathered in Nice for Bastille Day celebrations. His parents, Gisele and Germain Lyon, his wife, Veronique, her parents Francois and Christiane Locatelli and their grandson Mickael Pellegrini, were all killed in the attack. Lyons is among dozens of witnesses, survivors and family members of the victims who will testify in a Paris court later this month about the horrific events of that night. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the massacre. However, French prosecutors said that while Boullel had been inspired by the extremist group’s propaganda, investigators had found no evidence that IS orchestrated the attack. Eight months before the Nice attack, on November 13, 2015, a group of hard-line IS extremists spread across Paris to carry out coordinated attacks on the Bataclan concert hall, cafes and the national stadium, killing 130 people and injuring hundreds. After a nine-month trial, the sole survivor of the hit squad that had terrorized the French capital, Salah Abdeslam, was convicted in June of murder and given a life sentence without parole for the deadliest peacetime attack in French history. The trial of the eight suspects in the Nice attack will be held in the same Paris courtroom as the trial against Abdeslam. French law stipulates that terrorism trials are held in the capital. The proceedings will be broadcast live at the Acropolis Convention Center in Nice for family members of the victims and the general public not traveling to Paris. Audio of the trial will also be available online, with a 30-minute delay. Many survivors and those grieving loved ones prepare to relive the traumatic events during the trial. For others, the proceedings – though far from the city still reeling from bloodshed and loss – are an opportunity to publicly recount their personal horrors that night and hear countless acts of bravery, humanity and compassion among strangers . With the perpetrator dead, few expect justice to be served. Audrey Borla, who lost her twin sister, Laura, will travel to Paris to confront the group of eight suspects. She wants to tell them how she has survived the past six years without the woman she calls her “other half” and how she plans to live a full life for many years even without her. “You took my sister from me, but you’re not going to make me stop living,” Borla said in an interview with France 3 television. “You’re not going to make me give up on life.”
Nicolas Vaux-Montagny reported from Paris. Oleg Cetinic contributed from Paris.
