A FRENCH COURT has banned a magazine from republishing images from last year’s Bastille Day attack that killed 86 people in Nice, but ignored calls to pull the issue from news stands.
Victims’ groups had accused Paris Match of sensationalising the assault – which saw a Tunisian Islamist radical drive a truck into a crowd watching fireworks on the beachfront – by publishing screen grabs from surveillance cameras.
The Paris prosecutor demanded the withdrawal of the magazine’s current edition, but yesterday’s ruling was restricted to two images that judges deemed an “attack on human dignity”.
It banned any new publication of these photos and their online distribution.
The court said the pictures were “obscene for showing people fleeing to escape death or about to die”.
A Paris Match spokesman welcomed the court’s decision, saying the magazine defended the right of readers to be informed and know the truth.
Its editor Olivier Royant had previously said the magazine wanted to pay homage to the victims on the attack’s first anniversary.
There will be subdued Bastille Day celebrations this year in Nice, with candles instead of fireworks and a speech from French President Emmanual Macron.
Macron and Trump
Macron will attend the Bastille Day military parade today alongside his American counterpart Donald Trump, before marking the first anniversary of the deadly terror attack in Nice.
The parade on Paris’s Champs-Elysees will commemorate the centenary of the US entering WWI and will feature horses, helicopters, planes and troops.
“This is a wonderful national celebration,” said Trump during a joint news conference with Macron yesterday, adding, “We look very much forward to it. Spectacular.”
Our two nations are forever joined together by the spirit of revolution and the fight for freedom.
Macron will give a short speech at the start of the parade to evoke the spirit of a national holiday even though it coincides with the Nice assault’s anniversary, his office said.
France has been under a state of emergency since November 2015, when 130 people were slaughtered in a wave of coordinated violence across Paris, with French lawmakers voting last week to extend it for the sixth time.
More than 130,000 security and emergency service workers have been deployed to protect revellers during this year’s Bastille Day celebrations, according to figures from France’s Interior Ministry.
Terror attacks in France have killed 239 people in eight incidents since January 2015, with Interior Minister Gerard Collomb saying seven terror plots have been foiled since the start of this year.
Macron will fly to the southern French city once the Paris military parade is over.
It his first Bastille Day celebration as president.
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