Update July 30th: the question can be considered as solved. A video covering the crime scene from 300m distance confirms that the fireworks ended at 22:19. At 22:36 it shows people on the Promenade suddenly fleeing from somewhat. At 22:56 and 23:12, the streets are emptied.
So the video confirms that the time of Sandra Bertin's report, 22:35, is the time of the terror arrack. And it belies Richard Gutjahr's claims that it happened 23:07 or "shortly after 23:00". Gutjahr has meanwhile corrected the time from 23:07 to 22:35 (see first update below), but the video belies also his new claim that the attack occurred during the fireworks.
Update July 28th: in a recent interview, Richard Gutjahr has surprisingly changed his account. See below.
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| Sandra Bertin (AFP) |
Two weeks after a truck killed 84 people in Nice by driving over them, the exact daytime of the terror ride is still not clear. This is most remarkable because the incidence was witnessed by thousands of people and authorities and the media ought to be able in the meantime to report the time of the crime up to the minute. But media reports in the immediate aftermath vary from 22:30 to shortly after 23:00, and the uncertainty hasn't improved since. Here's an excerpt:
22:30 Valery Hache, AFP photographer
Nice Matin
Die Welt
Washington Post
22:30-23:00 Le Figaro
22:45 New York Times
Zeit
CNN
Liberation
22:45-23:00 Le Monde
23:00 Spiegel
BBC
23:07 Richard Gutjahr, ARD
The last source, the German TV journalist Richard Gutjahr, is the most reliable one insofar as he was in Nice, witnessed the last seconds of the terror ride from the balcony of his hotel room and filmed it with his mobile phone in a now famous video. He probably extracted the time from the metadata of the video.
All sources agree that the truck was going very fast, so it is incomprehensible why Le Figaro and Le Monde report a time span of 15 and 30 minutes. There are also countless private witness accounts, most of them pinpointing the attack at around 23:00.
So far, this hotchpotch has not been clarified by any official, no police president, no mayor, no prosecutor and no politician. The world had to wait for a medium rank police officer to learn of more details. Sandra Bertin from the Nice police department is responsible for the surveillance footage and hit the headlines by uncovering a row between the national government and the local law enforcement. She claims, among other things, to have been urged by the interior ministry to destroy crucial surveillance footage, which she refused to do. Instead she went public in an interview with the Journal du Dimanche and revealed details, finally:
Je me rappellerai toute ma vie de cette heure-là : 22h33. J’étais devant les écrans du CSU avec les équipes. Nous recevons alors des policiers municipaux positionnés sur la Promenade le signalement d’un camion fou. Nous récupérons tout de suite son image à l’écran et nous demandons son interception. Le camion était lancé à 90 km/h, sans phares, sans qu’on l’entende à cause du bruit. Il contourne le barrage de la police municipale. Les équipes n’ont pas pu l’arrêter. On ne crève pas les pneus d’un 19 tonnes avec un revolver! A ce moment-là, d’autres policiers municipaux sont en civil dans la foule, qui se retrouvent face à lui. S’ils avaient été armés comme nos collègues de la police nationale, une de nos revendications, ils auraient pu le stopper. Le poids-lourd se retrouve finalement face aux policiers nationaux, qui tirent et le neutralisent. Il est 22h34.
So she basically says that the truck's terror ride began at 22:33 and ended at 22:34. Two days later, Le Monde published excerpts of her report, leaked by the national police and causing confusion at the newspaper.
Le premier policier cité est national, et il court après le véhicule : « Vingt-deux heures trente-cinq minutes et quinze secondes : visualisons un agent de la police nationale à pied courir derrière le camion. » Puis c’est au tour immédiatement d’un agent municipal : « Vingt-deux
heures trente-cinq minutes et vingt secondes : visualisons un agent de
la police municipale à pied courir derrière le camion ; le véhicule se
situe alors à l’intersection de la promenade des Anglais et de la rue
Meyerbeer. » C’est-à-dire au niveau du premier point de contrôle tenu par la police nationale.
The said intersection (Promenade des Anglais/Rue Meyerbeer) is exactly the location captured in the Gutjahr video, i.e not far away from the final position of the truck. But there is a yawning 32-minutes discrepancy between Bertin's 22:35 and Gutjahr's 23:07.
So what's going on here? It's Bertin vs. Gutjahr. We have a 22:30+-5 minutes version and a 23:00+-5 minutes version. It appears that one of them must be utterly wrong. This is most astonishing because Gutjahr is a professional journalist and Bertin is a professional video analyst.
The said intersection (Promenade des Anglais/Rue Meyerbeer) is exactly the location captured in the Gutjahr video, i.e not far away from the final position of the truck. But there is a yawning 32-minutes discrepancy between Bertin's 22:35 and Gutjahr's 23:07.
So what's going on here? It's Bertin vs. Gutjahr. We have a 22:30+-5 minutes version and a 23:00+-5 minutes version. It appears that one of them must be utterly wrong. This is most astonishing because Gutjahr is a professional journalist and Bertin is a professional video analyst.
One circumstance might help to clarify the confusion: the fireworks. All media reports and private statements agree that the attack occured shortly after the fireworks ended, ranging from five to fifteen minutes afterwards. The determination of the end of the fireworks might verify either Gutjahr or Bertin.
Gutjahr himself says that the fireworks lasted from 22:15 to 23:00. However, there is a video of the complete fireworks which lasts only 18 minutes. Gutjahr probably included the preparations and made a rather rough estimation. So 22:15 seems to be a reasonable lower bound for the begin of the fireworks. Adding the 18 minutes duration of the fireworks video and the 5 minutes minimum until the attack delivers a lower bound of 22:38 for the attack. The fireworks were certainly finished before 23:00, so Gutjahr's 23:07 is a reasonable upper bound for the attack.
Or is it possible that both Gutjahr and Bertin are right; that they are talking about different incidences; and that the official narrative has to be rewritten? If so, Le Monde sits on a bombshell and ought to tell the public more about Bertin's terror timeline - soon.
Update: In a recent interview, Richard Gutjahr all of a sudden has changed the time data of his early reports: now he claims he filmed the truck at 22:35 when the fireworks were still ongoing.
Having initially wanted to produce a Snapchat story of the festivities, Gutjahr was stood on his hotel balcony filming the fireworks at 10:35pm when he noticed people running and screaming in the street below him.
"I saw something was wrong – something just didn't fit the image," he said.
"I happened to have my camera in my hand because I was still Snapchatting the fireworks, so not knowing what to expect, I turned the camera from vertical view to the horizontal position and used the phone's regular camera to film. I didn't want this to be on Snapchat."
It is absolutely certain however that the fireworks were finished when he took the famous video footage. First, there is no firework noise audible in the video. Second, there is a video of the end of the fireworks showing that no panic has erupted at this point. Third, it is known from another video that a rock band was playing just when the truck ploughed through the crowd - the band certainly didn't start before the fireworks were finished.
So why did Gutjahr change his account?
