After Nice, we all must learn to live with a certain amount of terrorism
Zhou Zunyou says the recent mass murder in Nice shows that even a state on high alert, as France was, cannot protect its citizens all the time from every kind of attack
Last Thursday, a large truck rammed through a crowd of revellers watching Bastille Day fireworks in Nice, France, killing more than 80 people and injuring more than 300, including two Chinese.
The perpetrator, shot dead on the spot by police, was Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a 31-year-old Tunisian with French residency. Although Islamic State has claimed responsibility, it does not seem that he operated in connection with the terrorist group.
The Nice attack is the latest among a spate of terrorist attacks in France since the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre. Compared with many other attacks in France and other parts of Europe, this assault is distinct owing to the use of a truck itself as a weapon.
The use of vehicle bombs has a long history. In April 1995, Timothy McVeigh launched the highest-profile attack of this kind. He detonated a truck packed with explosives in front of a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168. In general, security authorities are more worried about vehicles being used as bombs than about them running over people. It’s important to note, however, that turning a vehicle into a killing machine is a tactic often seen in Israel and the Palestinian territories, where such attacks have cost many lives.
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Jihadists in Western countries have also tried employing vehicles themselves as weapons, but, except for the Nice carnage, the casualties of such attacks have not usually been extremely heavy. For example, in December 2014 there were two separate car-ramming attacks in the French cities of Dijon and Nantes, leaving around 20 pedestrians injured and one dead. In June 2007, two terrorists tried to drive a Jeep loaded with petrol and gas canisters into the arrivals area of Glasgow Airport in the UK, but killed no one.
