IS also claimed responsibility for the November 13 attacks in Paris which killed 130 people. “He would break anything he saw in front of him”, Mohamed Mondher Lahouaiej Bouhlel said.
Advertisement
The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the July 14 terrorist attack in Nice, France, which killed 84 people and injured more than 200, in a statement released on Saturday, July 16.
The attacker “carried out the operation in response to calls to target citizens of coalition countries fighting Islamic State”, the group said, without mentioning the assailant’s name.
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) claimed Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel as one of its “soldiers” on Saturday, but what little is known so far about the 31-year-old Tunisian suggests a troubled, unpleasant person who showed little outward interest in Islam.
Records show the 19-tonne truck that he rammed through the seaside crowd in Nice was rented in the outskirts of the city on July 11 and was overdue on Thursday, the night of the attack.
The prosecutor said Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had been armed and at the end of his rampage he had fired “several times at three police officers” before he was shot dead.
Molins said that “he was on the other hand totally unknown to intelligence services. and was never placed on a watch list for radicalisation”. “It’s satisfying to see life coming back”, lawmaker Eric Ciotti told France’s iTele broadcaster from the promenade.
While his court-appointed lawyer said that he observed no radicalization in the father of three, who was said to be fond of chasing women and drinking, French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve insisted that the 31-year-old was “radicalized very quickly”.
The Embassy of France in Wellington will hold a minute’s silence at midday on Monday to mark the loss of lives in the Nice attack.
The arrests, which came on top of two others since the killing including the attacker’s wife, concerned his “close entourage”, police sources said – they were made in two different areas of Nice.
A man covered with a towel was apprehended by French police this morning as the investigation continued two days after the savage attack on the Promenade des Anglais.
Ordinarily for a lone wolf attack to be adopted by ISIS the petpetrator has to have first pledged allegiance – known as giving “bayaa” – to the terrorist group’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi first.
However Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s father insists the attacker had “nothing to do with religion”, revealing that his son didn’t pray, didn’t fast, drank alcohol and used drugs.
At least 10 children were among the dead.
Describing the attack as an act of terror, Hollande earlier said that operational reserves had been called up to assist police and security forces across the country.
French President Francois Hollande met his defence and security chiefs and cabinet ministers as political and media criticism mounted over security failings after the third major attack in France in 18 months.
He and his wife had 3 children, but she had demanded a divorce after a “violent argument”, one neighbor said.
Prosecutors said Tunisian Lahouaiej-Bouhlel drove the truck 2km along the promenade targeting people.
Advertisement
Mr Hollande, who has said the attack was of “an undeniable terrorist nature”, has already extended a state of emergency by three months.
