Families caught in painful limbo in Nice

The painstaking process of identifying the victims of the Bastille Day truck attack in Nice dragged into its fourth day on Monday, adding to the anguish of family members caught between uncertainty and grief.

Eighty-four people were killed in the Thursday night attack on the Promenades des Anglais, which happened as they were making their way home from a waterfront fireworks display. But just 35 bodies had been identified definitively by Sunday afternoon, according to the Paris prosecutor's office.

The excruciating delay is adding to the suffering of survivors.

One family spent days canvassing hospitals and office for news of a 4-year-old boy whose mother perished, their frustration boiling over into a confrontation with a regional official. University of California, Berkeley students plastered fliers around the city asking for any information on the whereabouts of three classmates at a technology entrepreneur education program. Several imams stepped into the official breach, posting themselves outside the Pasteur Hospital on Sunday to help family members visiting the injured or looking for confirmation of their worst fears from the hospital morgue.

"It puts them in extreme angst, and extreme tension," said Brigitte Erbibou, a psychologist who has been counseling family members at center helping victims and family members.

"It's unbearable because the more the days go by, the more they suspect the (death) announcement will come. However, until it is announced, the wait is absolutely unbearable because there is no way to come to terms and to begin the work of. the grieving process."

She counseled two children this weekend whose father was killed but whose mother remained missing.

(China Daily 07/19/2016 page11)