Exactly one month after the Bastille Day attacks in Nice which left 85 dead and some 300 wounded, the sound of a firecracker reportedly thrown under a car next to a narrow pedestrian street in Juan-les-Pins Sunday evening around 10:30 pm is mistaken for a terrorist attack or explosion. Complete chaos ensues, as crowds of people run in every direction and cars try to escape centre-ville. The incident left 45 with minor injuries, and Nice-Matin reports 42 were taken to La Fontonne in Antibes, as well as hospitals in Cannes, Grasse and Pasteur II and Lenval in Nice; one casualty, a pregnant woman, remains in critical condition.
While the event seems to have moved on to the question of legally selling fireworks in today’s day and age, there are some people asking what really happened last night.
One source on the scene, who narrowly survived the July 14 attack in Nice, told Monaco Life exclusively that she and her husband were having a meal one street away on the beach when suddenly loads of people started running, some even into the sea. “We couldn’t believe it,” the anonymous source said. “Not again!” The reaction of physical fear kicked in pretty quickly she added, before describing the scene with “a lot of military presence and numerous sirens”.
As things died down quickly on the beach, and although people were pretty shaken up, the couple left to discover “a big area cordoned off with about 40 to 50 police, military and emergency vehicles”.
In her own words the witness recounts, “People were being taken away in stretchers, others were bandaged. I spoke to a guy who was a journalist and he said the official story was that the crowd heard a big noise and panicked then added, ‘I’m not a racist but all I can advise you is to vote Le Pen. This is not over.’
“Another man hobbled through the cordon and we asked him what happened and he said he wasn’t ‘supposed’ to say much but that he thought that carnage had just been averted.”
It’s difficult to know exactly what happened in Juan-les-Pins and while people are certainly on edge, there seems to be “a big effort to downplay it”.
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