Officials identify 7-year-old boy hurt in Nice attack

Officials have at last identified a 7-year-old boy in a coma whose picture had been circulated on social media after no relatives stepped forward immediately after he was injured in the Nice truck attack.

The spokeswoman of Lenval children’s hospital in Nice, Stephanie Simpson, tells The Associated Press on Sunday that the boy is Romanian and had been visiting Nice with his parents, who remain missing.

The boy’s grandmother traveled from Germany on Saturday to make the identification, after a relative in Nice reported the family missing.

The boy is among six children still hospitalized after the attack, Simpson says. She says the boy was on artificial respiration and had not undergone any surgery.

“There is still hope he is going to wake up,” she says.

US Secretary of State John Kerry says the challenge of finding and stopping people like the truck driver who plowed into the crowd is “worse than the needle in the haystack.”

Kerry says the US had no knowledge of the killer as a radicalized individual and that if someone is an extremist of “one or two days vintage” it’s easy to cause mayhem.

Kerry, appearing on CNN, says the attack shows the Islamic State group is under great pressure, and that people are acting out in various places. He says the group sees “the noose closing around them.”

— AP