Alain Boudail, owner of Le Cocodile Restaurant in Promenade Des Anglais, told TIME the attack was “carnage.”

“I could hear screams, cries ­and it looked like bowling, people were being thrown in the air ­ two or three meters high,” he said. “In front of my restaurant there were at least ten people laying on the street, dead.”

He said High Club, a nightclub next door, had been turned into a field hospital.

For France, the attack on Thursday night is likely to be deeply distressing — and to raise the question about how the country can possible avoid further attacks, given the extraordinary security measures already in place. What is more, Thursday’s mass deaths, if terrorism, will be the third terror attack in France in just 18 months; in January 2015 ISIS and al-Qaeda gunmen killed 17 people at the Charlie Hebdo satiric publication and a kosher supermarket, both in Paris. Then came the Paris attacks — a devastating blow, from which the country had only just begun to shake off the anxiety and grief.

By midnight, no group had claimed responsibility for the chaos. But regional police and local officials in the South of France quickly declared it a terrorist attack. They appealed for people to remain calm and went on television to tell people to stay indoors — clearly fearing that there might be multiple attacks on the streets, as there were in last November’s Paris attacks, when ISIS gunmen-suicide bombers opened fire on cafés and a music hall, killed 130 people. On Twitter, the regional mayor Christian Estrosi told Nice residents, “Stay for the moment in your homes. More info to come.”

France has been under a state of emergency since then, and thousands of armed soldiers patrol department stores, stations, and other public places. Security was hugely ramped up during the FIFA European Football Championships, which French officials feared could be a target of attack. Indeed, police in Nice evacuated a shopping center in Nice late last month, after a threat that a bomb would explode during the England-Iceland match being played in that city. There was a palpable sense of relief among the French after the championship’s final game last Sunday, that the monthlong tournament ended without an attack.

This article was originally published at Time.com. It has been updated from the original with additional information.