“He carried out the operation in response to calls to target nationals of states that are part of the coalition fighting the Islamic State”, said the news agency Amaq, which supports the militant group. He told reporters Bouhlel drove the truck onto the sidewalk to dodge a police barricade blocking the Promenade des Anglais.
Advertisement
Bouhlel did not appear to be a devout Muslim.
However, The Huffington Post quoted Rabab Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a sister of the attacker, as saying the brother “did not drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes, but he also did not pray and never entered a mosque in his life”.
In Msaken, Tunisia, the man’s father, Mohamed Mondher Lahouaiej Bouhlel, told Agence France-Presse last night that his son had depression, but that he “had nearly no links to religion”, and that “he didn’t pray, he didn’t fast, he drank alcohol, and even used drugs”. Local media reported four men believed to be relatives were being questioned by French prosecutors.
The couple had three children, two daughters and a boy, aged between 5 years and 18 months, police said. The identities of four of them were not known, but neighbors told The Associated Press that Bouhlel’s estranged wife had been taken away Friday by police. What is known publicly about Bouhlel so far suggests a troubled, angry man with little interest in the group’s ultra-puritanical brand of Islam. In March, he was given a six-month suspended sentence by a Nice court for a road-rage incident in which he attacked another driver with a wooden pallet.
Bouhlel had been in France for 10 years and lived locally.
Speaking outside the high-rise block of flats on Boulevard Henri Sappia, where the suspect had previously lived with his family, Samiq, 19, who did not want to give his surname, said: “I never heard him speak about extremism, I can not believe that he was a member of Islamic State”.
“I think there was psychiatric problem”, he said.
“He smelled of alcohol in the middle of Ramadan”. She said five children were still in “critical condition”, and an eight-year-old in a stable condition had not been identified.
Her husband, John Lambert, said the couple was nearly struck by Bouhlel’s truck. We are all very shocked. “It’s shocking to find out that your neighbor is a killer”.
Bouhlel’s father insisted in comments made to AFP that his son was not religious.
Bouhlel didn’t leave any messages in his apartment, which police officers were still searching Saturday for evidence, or in the truck where he died.
His identification papers were found in the vehicle after police had shot him dead halting the massacre which had lasted for around two kilometres.
Paris: French police today arrested a man and a woman with ties to the man behing a truck ramming attack claimed by the ISIS, a judicial source said.
Hollande held an emergency security meeting Saturday, and late in the day Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced he would call up 12,000 police reserves in addition to more than 120,000 police and soldiers already deployed around the country “because of the terrorist threat”.
Advertisement
In June 2015, Yassin Salhi killed his boss and pinned his severed head to a fence at an industrial gas factory in Lyon and surrounded it with Islamic flags. He made similar statements after attacks in January 2015 at a kosher supermarket in Paris and the Charlie Hebdo newspaper that killed 17, and again after the November 13 attacks in Paris on a rock concert, the national stadium and cafes that killed 130. He was carrying a piece of paper pledging allegiance to the Islamic State.
