"Two images will not go away. One of a huge white truck, scattering the crowd and hurtling towards us in a clatter of metal shards," writes AFP's former veteran journalist Robert Holloway.

"The other of a family, three or four adults, a small child in a stroller and another, about five years old, getting in the way to his mother’s irritation. They were at the top of the steps as my wife Sylvie and I climbed up from the beach after watching the Bastille Day fireworks display in Nice."

"I reported from Beirut in 1982 as Israel bombed the city. I was only eight blocks from the Twin Towers in New York City when they collapsed in September 2001. But never in all my decades of reporting had I been in a situation like the one in Nice."