UPDATED 9.04PM Britain’s Daily Mirror reports Isis has now claimed responsibility for the Nice terror attack.
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The driver of a truck who killed scores of people on Nice’s oceanfront promenade Thursday was a Tunisian petty criminal described by his father as a violent depressive and by neighbors as a loner who showed no outward signs of being a devout Muslim. “He didn’t talk about it, and I didn’t talk about it with him”, Mondher Lahouaiej-Bouhlel told French media from his home in Tunisia.
Another five Tunisians are still missing following Thursday night’s attack that killed 84 people in the southern French resort city and was claimed today by the Islamic State jihadist group (IS).
The truck zig-zagged along the seafront Promenade des Anglais for two kilometres as a fireworks display marking the French national day ended.
It was eventually stopped when police shot dead the driver.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said it is “continuing to work to establish contact with a small number of individuals with whom contact has not yet been made, but the Department has no reason to believe that any of these have been caught up in the incident”.
Some 30,000 people were on the Promenade des Anglais at the time of the attack, officials said.
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. That includes the suspect’s ex-wife, as reporter Jake Cigainero tells our Newscast unit.
The defense minister also said that in response to the attack France will maintain its mobilization of 10,000 additional troops.
France is heading into elections next year, and the deeply unpopular President Francois Hollande is facing multiple challengers, from within his own Socialist Party, from the right-wing Republicans and from the far-right National Front. Hollande declared three days of mourning after the assault, as the shellshocked country found itself again mourning its dead after attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine in January 2015 and the November 2015 massacre in Paris.
Hollande announced that the state of emergency – which he had said only the day before would end on 26 July -will be extended by three months.
The Islamic State has claimed that Nice attacker Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel was a “soldier” in their terrorist organization.
The attack also injured more than 200 people and left the area strewn with bodies, including many children.
French authorities were investigating whether the 31-year-old lorry driver had acted alone or with accomplices, and if his motives were connected to radical Islam.
Authorities said he was married with three children.
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“I’m not an investigator, but if the necessary measures had been taken, the catastrophe wouldn’t have happened”, the Journal quoted Alain Juppé, a former prime minister and the current mayor of Bordeaux, as saying.
