IS claimed responsibility for last week’s attack, though Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Monday that investigators have found no sign yet that attacker Mohamed Lahouaiyej Bouhlel had links to a particular network.
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French health minister Marisol Touraine said that 85 people were still hospitalised, 18 people of them in critical condition.
The Dubliner, who has lived in the city for eight years, said he was happy to stay in the face of the apparent targeting of France.
Mr Valls, who said security services have prevented 16 attacks over three years, said he believed Islamic State had manipulated an unstable individual to carry out the attack.
The prosecutor spoke hours after thousands of people massed on the waterfront promenade where the attack took place for a moment of silence.
“I want to call on all French patriots who wish to do so, to join this operational reserve”, said Cazeneuve of a force now made up of 12,000 volunteers aged between 17 and 30.
A psychiatrist who treated him more than a decade ago told Reuters on Sunday that he had been aggressive towards his parents and had body image problems. Pained and outraged epitaphs have been written in blue maker on stones placed where police shot him dead.
Minutes before the attack he texted someone asking them to bring more weapons.
2200: A fireworks display attended by some 30,000 locals and tourists, including many children, begins near a tourist office on the Promenade des Anglais, a wide boulevard lined with palm trees and vast walking areas on the water’s edge that was closed to traffic for the occasion.
A sign posted around town demonstrates a strong feeling of solidarity, calling for blood donations, stuffed animals for injured children and a plea to “unite against the insane ones”.
But the mood wasn’t just a sombre one – Prime Minister Manuel Valls was booed on arrival in Nice by some members of the crowd (see video below).
Despite mounting criticism from the conservative opposition and the far-right over how President Francois Hollande’s Socialist government is handling security, Valls said there was no such thing as zero risk and that new attacks would occur.
The attack comes 8 months after ISIS jihadists killed 130 people across Paris, and 18 months after 3 days of terror at the Charlie Hebdo weekly and a Jewish supermarket killed 17.
“We are at war, outright war”. Our enemies don’t have no taboos, no borders, no principles.
Experts say that Bouhlel would have moved in an environment where he would have been exposed to the extremist ideology preached by the Islamic State group and others.
Christian Estrosi, president of the wider Riviera region and a a security hardliner, accused the government of failing completely in Nice.
Three students on a European study program – an American, Ukrainian and Estonian – are still missing following last week’s truck attack on the French city of Nice.
French authorities are officially considering the man who orchestrated the Bastille Day rampage in Nice a terrorist, Paris prosecutor François Molins said Monday afternoon, insisting that the man had taken a recent interest in radical Islam and had sought out information on similar recent attacks.
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Hundreds of French jihadists have gone to fight alongside IS in Iraq and Syria.
