Nice attack: first victims identified

A Parisian identification center for victims has been set up, helping authorities and relatives to identify the victims of the lorry massacre that shocked the French coastal city of Nice to its core.

The death toll so far has reached 84, including 10 children and adolescents.

Several were the victims mown by a 19-tonne truck rammed by Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, 31, into the large crowd as fireworks were ending in the French Riviera city.

Fatima, a mother who was celebrating France’s national day with her children, was amongst the first to die.

Local media have started to identify the victims, including 27-year-old Timothy, a tobacconist, who was with his pregnant wife. A whole family from Herserange was killed: the elderly couple, their daughter and their 28-year-old grandson, an economics professor in a private high school in Longwy.

Two police officers of the Alpes-Maritimes frontier who, according to Le Parisien, came undercover to attend the festivities that night, were also killed.

Nice Matin reported that the 60-year-old president of athletics club, and six residents of the village of Gattières, including a mother and her 17-year-old son, were among the victims.

Amid the ten victims already identified are also two Americans, father and son, aged 51 and 11, from Lakeway near Austin (Texas).

Many of the victims killed in Nice, the second French city most frequented by tourists, are believed to be foreigners.

Three German nationals, a teacher and two high school students of the institution Paula Fürst, remain missing, the rector of Berlin told the German media.

A Ukrainian, a Tunisian, an Armenian, a Russian studying finance, and a 54-year-old Swiss are also on the list, their respective Ministries of Foreign Affairs said.

Meanwhile, the remaining missing persons’ faces, as of Thursday night, had began circulating on social media.