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Continuing Coverage of France Terrorist Attack. Aired 2-2:30p ET

Aired July 15, 2016 - 14:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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[14:00:19] BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: And you're watching CNN. I'm Brooke Baldwin. We are live in Nice, France. It is 8:00 here in the evening, broadcasting around the world for our special breaking news coverage of an unthinkable act of terror.

The heart of the French Rivera, a gorgeous iconic symbol of western leisure, transformed into a killing field. This country now reeling from yet another terror attack. This time, the numbers we have at this hour, 84 dead, ten of those children, with more than 200 others injured, many of them critically. And we have to warn you, the video you will see over the next couple of hours is graphic. This killer's weapon of choice - a massive freight truck.

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BALDWIN: Just imagine you have these unsuspecting revelers. They are plowed down as they gathered right here along this beautiful promenade to celebrate Bastille Day. This is France's independence. This man, this madman's deadly rampage stretching for a staggering 1.3 miles along this beach front road. Some say the driver was shooting as he carved a path through the crowds here. And the bullet-riddled windshield showing the aftermath. This killer shot and killed by police.

Joining me here at the top of the hour, Nima Elbagir, senior international correspondent who's been learning a bit more about who this madman was.

NIMA ELBAGIR, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, as we understand it, he had no crimes. He was not on the police radar. He was not on the security forces radar in terms of association with any kind of terror. He did have a rap sheet for violent crime and his wife is now in custody. We understand that police are combing through his computer, any kind of digital device, any devices - mobile devices that have accessed the Internet because in this kind of a situation, especially with France's recruitment problem, the first thing they're going to want to be looking for is if - there are no obvious links at this time to those in known terror cells. What about the links that he might have made online.

BALDWIN: Right.

ELBAGIR: Because now it's all about finding out who else could have been involved. Was he self-radicalized? Was this a lone wolf? Because Nice - and it's hard to imagine standing here -

BALDWIN: It's stunning.

ELBAGIR: Yes, looking out.

BALDWIN: It's - I mean flying in an hour ago -

ELBAGIR: Yes.

BALDWIN: Yachts, people on the beach, but it's just oddly quiet.

ELBAGIR: The (INAUDIBLE).

BALDWIN: Yes.

ELBAGIR: But what's - what's extraordinary is that Nice has had a recruitment problem. It has been at the epicenter of France's recruitment problem. This is a country that has estimate - an estimate of about 1,800 -

BALDWIN: People don't realize that.

ELBAGIR: Yes, people don't. But one of the senior ISIS French language propagandas came from here in Nice. He has an entire brigade of fighters that hail solely from Nice and he's responsible for dozens of young men leaving Nice, leaving France. And part of the 1,800 just here alone, 470 potentially French speakers leaving for Belgium. So for authorities the question is, who else knew, who else was he in touch with?

BALDWIN: We'll talk more in a moment because I think, as we were all learning about this last evening and hearing about a truck as a method used as a weapon and how terror organizations have specifically called for that in taking down westerners. We'll talk to you again in a minute. Nima Elbagir, thank you very much.

But let's move along because one of the just extremely, extremely sad pieces of this entire story is the children. Many of them injured, and as we mentioned, a number of them killed. A lot of people in the hospital right now here in Nice. In fact, this picture, a grim reminder of the children killed and injured during this attack. And you can see the truck bed filled with strollers just abandoned here along this promenade. We know ten children were killed. Hospital sources today telling CNN, 28 children remain hospitalized.

Let me bring in CNN's senior international correspondent, Atika Shubert, who's been at the hospital talking to, I know, a lot of these victims who, from what I understand, you know, it's one thing when you're dealing with - when doctors are treating bullet wounds. But you have car crash wounds. Fifty kids, some sort of severe wounding.

ATIKA SHUBERT, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, it's absolutely stunning the number of children that were brought in.

We're actually on the other end of the promenade. This is where the truck began its attack. And that blue building right over there is the Lenval Children's Hospital. It was actually the closest hospital to the scene of the attack. So they were expecting lots of wounded to come in, but they didn't realize how many of them were going to be children.

We spoke to one doctor who said what they saw were basically massive blunt trauma, dismembered limbs, massive thoracic injuries. A lot of head injuries. Not just because these are children caught under the truck, but also because these were young children that were caught in the stampede to get out.

[14:05:07] We talked to one 16-year-old girl who was just absolutely shattered by what she saw. She survived with a leg injury, but she broke down in tears when she tried to describe what she saw, blood everywhere, bodies on the road here. And this is the kind of trauma that's going to live with these children for the rest of their lives, Brooke.

BALDWIN: Atika Shubert, we'll continue to tell the stories, especially that of children. I know so many kids, you know, in these hospitals and their parents are trying to find them because of the horror that happened here last evening.

Atika, thank you very much.

I want to bring in another guest here. This is someone who witnessed the horror firsthand. He is Paul DeLane. He's lived in France for 25 years.

Paul, I hate meeting you under the circumstances, but thank you so much for spending time with me.

How are you?

PAUL DELANE, EYEWITNESS TO TERROR ATTACKS: Still in shock. I don't think that its's actually quite hit me yet. I'm kind of numb. It doesn't seem real. It just doesn't seem real.

BALDWIN: And it just happened right there.

DELANE: Just right there.

BALDWIN: Right beyond the white sort of border fencing.

DELANE: And we were basically just standing right over next to McDonald's, in the middle of this street, and saw thousands of people just running this way. With the loud music, we couldn't hear a thing. We didn't hear gunshots, nothing. But people were just running. Automatically just thought, terrorists, and that's -

BALDWIN: Is that what you first thought?

DELANE: Yes. Yes. Yes, automatically that's what - that's what I think that everybody first thought, without a doubt. The world that we live in, I think that that's the first reaction that everyone has when there's a - when there's a panic. BALDWIN: Let's - help paint the picture for people who have never been

lucky enough to come to Nice. I mean here we're standing on this mega promenade lined with palm trees, beautiful hotels, you know, sort of high-end area, gorgeous sea over here. How full - I mean explain to me what this area would have looked like.

DELANE: And I have never been in a crowd that packed before. We were literally standing shoulder -

BALDWIN: Celebrating.

DELANE: Celebrating. In a good mood. I've mentioned it before, I even stayed to listen to the music because the ambiance was so - was so festive and I felt safe, you know? I just felt like it was - I felt comfortable, even being so close to so many people. And that was what scared me the most was when people started running, we all actually had to start running as a mass because if you didn't run with, then, you know, you could have been trampled over or fallen. I've already heard stories of people falling down and people just running over them.

BALDWIN: That's right.

DELANE: I didn't see that.

BALDWIN: That's right.

DELANE: We were all very careful and, in our area, and I kept screaming, "don't panic, don't panic." People were running a lot faster than I was.

BALDWIN: Your partner grabbed your hand and -

DELANE: That's the thing. I actually was frozen for the first initial few moments because I - I thought terrorists, and then I thought, should I lie down on the ground? Should I hide? Or should I run with everybody? But as I was thinking all this, my partner took my hand and just said, "run, run, run." And so - he kind of snapped me out of - out of this reflection that I was having at the moment.

BALDWIN: How are you supposed to know what to do? This should never happen. You should never have to think -

DELANE: But that's the thing -

BALDWIN: But we're - we're having to think like this. Did you see the truck coming?

DELANE: No, because as you see, again, there's a lot of palm trees. There's a lot of - there's a lot of obstruction. So I'm sure that most people who are running didn't see a darn thing. They didn't see anything. They just knew that there was -

BALDWIN: They knew to run.

DELANE: Yes, they knew to run. BALDWIN: The other direction.

DELANE: Yes, the other direction. I was asked as well, well, how did you know which direction to run in? I just ran with the masses. There was no one running that way. Everybody was going that way. So I followed them. And then we would slow down for a while, and then there would be another wave of screaming and panic and people would start running again, so we -

BALDWIN: What did it sound like?

DELANE: Screaming. Just, terror, screaming, like you - like you see in the movies, you know? Unreal. Something like you've never heard before. All the terror. Almost - almost like as if people were being hurt, that's what scared you even more, but that were just -

BALDWIN: They were being hurt. They were being hurt. And children were being hurt.

DELANE: They were being - I mean - I mean - I mean in my area speaking of the thousands of people who actually weren't touched at all, it's - it's - they were being hurt, too, in a - in a another way.

BALDWIN: Absolutely.

DELANE: And there were some -

BALDWIN: How many children did you see? Because I just keep thinking about all these kids because parents were going one way, kids were going in another way. You see pictures of strollers.

DELANE: Well, that was the thing. That was what - what, you know, I had my moments as I was running up the street of - of going, what's going on? And then that's what hit me the most is when I saw couples and the moms pushing their little buggies along, running with the buggies, with the father having two, three kids in his arms running as fast as he can as well. And the kids just looking completely perplexed, not understanding a darn thing what's going on. And that really - that really touched me because, I mean, we - we were lucky, Jean Pierre and I, were lucky to just have him and I.

[14:10:28] And I was lucky to have him because he -

BALDWIN: He grabbed you.

DELANE: He did give me that boost to - to move. I mean I eventually would have moved but I think it was best that he had moved me along. And I also thank God that we stayed and listened to the music for just a couple more minutes because the short cut to the way I go home is right where the truck was and -

BALDWIN: And had you not stayed to listen to the music -

DELANE: And if I hadn't stayed for two minutes, for two minutes, I literally would have been two minutes further down the road, which would have been - who knows. Who knows. BALDWIN: You have what happened in Paris in November. You have what happened here in Nice. Again, I'm - I'm - we're standing surrounded by beauty, yet the world has changed.

DELANE: It totally has, unfortunately. It's - we live in a world of - of a lot of hate. A lot of hate. I just can't - I just can't understand it. I can't understand it. Why? Why? It's the same question everybody's asking. Why so much hate?

BALDWIN: I'm so sorry.

DELANE: Thank you.

BALDWIN: Thank you so much.

DELANE: Thank you. Thank you.

BALDWIN: Thank you. Thank you.

Paul DeLane here in Nice with me.

Coming up next, a truck used as a weapon. How these attacks are evolving. Plus, what this attacker's past reveals about possible motivations and what he left behind at his home.

Also ahead, two Americans among the victims in the attack. A father and his young son. You will hear from the boy's baseball coach.

I'm Brooke Baldwin live here in Nice. You're watching CNN's special live coverage.

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[14:16:19] BALDWIN: Welcome back. You're watching CNN's special live coverage. I'm Brooke Baldwin, live here in Nice, in France, where, for the third time in a year-and-a-half, flags nationwide are at half- staff. You'll recall January, 2015, 17 people were murdered in an attack against the Paris offices of the magazine "Charlie Hebdo." Also a kosher grocery and another cite there. Then flash forward to November 13th, that very year in the very same city, a team of extremists swarmed six venues in Paris, including the Bataclan Theater, in total 130 people were killed. And now here we are on the French Rivera in Nice, which is about an eight and a half-hour drive to the southeast, 84 people killed here just last evening, another 202 injured, 52 of them critically. Many, many children.

No question this is a national tragedy. But unlike the other two attacks, it is still not yet clear the why, if a terror group directed the carnage that took place here on this palm tree-lined promenade behind me.

CNN's Nima Elbagir is back with me, along with CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank, who was working overnight trying to figure out who, why.

So this guy, no known jihadi ties. PAUL CRUICKSHANK, CNN TERRORISM ANALYST: Well, he was not on the radar

screen of French counterterrorism services at all. They hadn't picked out before this attack any indication whatsoever that he had a jihadi mindset. And still as of this hour, we've not been told yet of any solid information evidence suggesting that he had been motivated by Islamist extremism.

Now, obviously, that is the working hypothesis of French investigators right now.

BALDWIN: Yes.

CRUICKSHANK: There may be some information from the laptops, from the phones and so on from their interviews that they haven't yet released yet pointing in that direction. But at this point, there is no solid evidence that has been publicly presented that this was a case of jihadist terrorism. That may change in the hours ahead.

BALDWIN: What about - and let me begin with you - the usage of a weapon as a car, this truck, because weren't terror groups calling for, you know, people to run over, to use cars as weapons, run over westerners?

ELBAGIR: Well, to use what they could and with - but specifically that car or truck line was one that ISIS had called for in 2010. And it is high-impact, low resourcing, and it was in keeping with their call for lone wolves, for people who were radicalize unlike people who perhaps were kind of outside of the jihadi mainstream, who weren't part of that broader network, because the reality is, is this is something that as they've lost territory in Syria and Iraq -

BALDWIN: Right.

ELBAGIR: They've been - they've been attempting to amplify their presence in any way they can and claiming responsibility for many attacks that they had no direct link to. It starts with inspiring those attacks. It starts with calls like say "use what you have," "don't attempt to come to us," "do what you can there."

BALDWIN: What do you think also of just using the truck as a weapon, and why then also have fake grenades and fake ammunition in this truck?

CRUICKSHANK: Frankly, that is really baffling people.

BALDWIN: It is.

CRUICKSHANK: Baffling investigators. Why would he have this inactive grenade, fake Kalashnikov, fake MI6 rifle in the cabin of his truck? Would that be perhaps because he wanted to present himself as being much better armed than he actually was? Perhaps because he felt there may be an opportunity, even during the course of attack, to take hostages, and, obviously, the better armed you are, the more the police are going to kind of -

BALDWIN: To be able to threaten with some material, even though it wouldn't have done anything.

CRUICKSHANK: Going to start negotiating -

BALDWIN: Right.

CRUICKSHANK: And perhaps not immediately launch an operation.

But, frankly, we just don't know the answers yet about why he had all this - these fake guns.

[14:20:03] Last night, the early indications, the early reporting from local authorities here were that these were real weapons. That was pointing many analysts in a different direction. The idea that he had sort of an arsenal of weapons.

BALDWIN: Right.

CRUICKSHANK: That there would be a network behind him. The fact that they appear to be just fake guns suggests maybe there wasn't a network behind him. It may have been that he was just one individual inspired by this terrorist ideology.

BALDWIN: What about the fact that he waited until the tail end of the fireworks? I mean, you know, this is essentially like - you know, broadcasting to an American audience, we just celebrated the Fourth of July, so it's similar. It's Bastille Day. You have thousands of people along the promenade. He lived in Nice. Maybe he'd been to the fireworks celebration before. We don't know. But the timing is curious as well.

ELBAGIR: Well, again, it's - the sources that I've been speaking to say that it speaks to a lot of what Paul is saying, that this isn't someone who is hooked into a broader network, that had the kind of experience. When you look at something like Brussels or Istanbul, they were timing it with the morning flights. They were hitting the vulnerability points. This is someone who was able to identify that this was a vulnerability point. That this was something that was going to be very high-impact and high-visibility, but then perhaps didn't necessarily know how to carry that through.

BALDWIN: Make your point again for people who are just joining us, because the notion, as we cover the terror attacks in Paris last November and we talked about the disenfranchised Muslim community in that part of the country, but here it's beautiful French Rivera. Why Nice? What was the connection with ISIS?

ELBAGIR: Well, I think there are two issues here. One, that you have remember, that even as we stand here, we're not very far from the disenfranchisement, the marginalization. The (INAUDIBLE) are not very far. As extraordinary as it is to imagine standing here in the middle of all this opulence and all (INAUDIBLE) represents.

BALDWIN: Right.

ELBAGIR: And that is why ISIS has been able to find a foothold here. Nice has been at the epicenter of ISIS' recruiting in France and their (INAUDIBLE) propaganda is one of the most successful propagandas actually in ISIS. Some - a man who's referred to as a super jihadist at one point because of the number of people, the sheer numbers of French foreign fighters that join ISIS, he comes from Nice. And so that's - that's what so many investigators here in France are -

BALDWIN: OK. I don't think people realize that at all. It's worth repeating.

ELBAGIR: That's what they're going to be trying to unpeg -

BALDWIN: OK.

ELBAGIR: How much of this was an inspiration of what Nice now represents within jihadi community.

CRUICKSHANK: But yet this was not an individual who was known, according to what we're understanding -

BALDWIN: Virtual unknown, right.

CRUICKSHANK: Of even going to the mosque, of being religious. There seemed to be a few parallels with the Orlando shooter at first blush. Omar Mateen. This was somebody that appears to have been very volatile, had some domestic disputes. It would appear, according to what we're hearing today with his wife, estranged wife.

BALDWIN: OK.

CRUICKSHANK: Volatility in the sense that in January of this year he got involved in a traffic accident and then hurled a wooden (ph) pallet at a driver, got a six-month suspended prison sentence for that. So that same volatility that we saw with the Orlando shooter perhaps. And perhaps a trigger towards very quick radicalization possibly -

BALDWIN: Right. Right.

CRUICKSHANK: Maybe because of some of his domestic circumstances. We just do not yet know at this point.

BALDWIN: We don't know. We don't know. It's still too early. Paul and Nima, thank you very much for now. We'll continue these conversations.

Coming up here in Nice, the evolving threat. How this truck attack is highlighting the security challenges facing counterterror officials. How do you begin to stop an attack like this? We'll discuss that.

And next, we'll talk more about the victims here of this tragedy in Nice. We'll also speak with someone who was there who saw the truck right along this promenade and talk about what exactly he saw happen. His personal account next.

I'm Brooke Baldwin. You're watching CNN's special live coverage from France.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) [14:28:11] BALDWIN: Welcome back. And it's just about 8:30 at night here in Nice, France. We are continuing our special breaking coverage of this horrendous, horrendous Bastille Day attack just last evening.

We are learning about the number of people injured, number of people killed. That number now up to 84 who lost their lives here along this promenade celebrating fireworks and music, and essentially France's independent day, independent of the monarchy and now celebrating being a republic. Of those deaths, two of them, American.

All of this happened when this driver carried out this horrific plan on this street filled with families just after a fireworks show. And as this truck careened just along the Mediterranean Sea, just down this street, chaos erupted, children were separated from their parents. And most difficult to report, many of them are among the dead.

CNN's Will Ripley is here with me talking about lives lost and in terms of the Americans, a father and son from Texas?

WILL RIPLEY, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: : Yes. I mean we know that out of the 84 who are dead, 10 were adolescents.

BALDWIN: Oh.

RIPLEY: And these - this family from Texas, the Copelands, from Austin, can you imagine, Brodie Copeland -

BALDWIN: No. No.

RIPLEY: A fifth-grader.

BALDWIN: NO.

RIPLEY: A fifth-grader. You get to come to the French Rivera. You get to see this amazing fireworks show. You're with your dad.

BALDWIN: Lucky kid.

RIPLEY: Yes. Summer of a lifetime. Can't wait to go back, tell your friends. And - and then this happened. And - and Sean, his dad, and Brodie were running and they didn't - they didn't make it out. Brodie was just 11 years old. And his school, they're talking about what a great kid he was. Sean, his dad, talking about what a great person he was. I mean everybody's in shock right now that this could have happened.

BALDWIN: I can't believe we're talking about this. The two - the father and son in Texas. And then also we've got new information about other Americans. UC-Berkeley students?

RIPLEY: Yes, so like 18 - 85 UC-Berkeley students are here on like a 15-day study abroad program.

[14:30:02] BALDWIN: OK. RIPLEY: Really exciting again to be in the south of France. And they were here watching the fireworks as well. And out of the group that was attending the celebration for Bastille Day, three of them got in the path of the truck and have --