The man drove a 19-tonne truck at high speed into crowds as a fireworks show to mark France’s Bastille Day national holiday came to an end on Thursday.
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But French authorities believe that something may have changed.
An Albanian couple were arrested in Nice on Sunday over the attack and were being held alongside four others.
However, French authorities were yet to produce any evidence Lahouaiej Bouhlel had any links to Islamic State.
While authorities have said little publicly about their investigation, a French security official told The Associated Press on Sunday that Bouhlel sold his vehicle just before the attack, which ended only when he was killed by police.
He was identified by fingerprints after his identification card was found in the truck, authorities said.
Many people are still awaiting news of their loved ones either injured in hospital or missing since the attack.
Touraine said 85 people were still hospitalised, 29 of whom were in intensive care, after the attack claimed by the Islamic State group which turned a night of Bastille Day celebrations in the Riviera city to horror.
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.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said some of those questioned had told police Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had recently been radicalised and had undergone a rapid transformation and had been a person with no apparent interest in religion.
He had had no record of making militant statements and was not known to the intelligence services, the minister said.
Valls defended France’s record on attacks, saying security services had prevented 16 over three years, and said the modus operandi of cajoling unstable people into striking by whatever means possible was hard to combat.
Bodies were left strewn across the storied seafront in the grisly attack by a man described by those who knew him as a loner with tendencies towards violence and depression.
“He had never been the subject of any kind of file or indication of radicalization”. His own father, in Tunisia, said his son did not pray or fast for Ramadan. “They are absolutely exhausted after a year and a half of intense efforts to try and protect this country”, Cruickshank said.
The app, called SAIP, was launched by the interior ministry just before the Euro 2016 soccer championship and was supposed to flash a warning on a user’s mobile phone screen if there was an attack close to their location or suspicion of an imminent strike. No major attacks occurred during the event.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said that the attack killed 84 people, including 10 children, and injured over 200 people.
2350: Sebastien Humbert, deputy prefect of the Alpes-Maritime region that includes Nice, says the early death toll estimate is around 30 and that the incident is for now being described as a “criminal attack”.
Scores are still continuing to receive medical treatment after the massacre which killed 84 people, French health minister Marisol Touraine said.
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Margot Haddad reported from Nice and Susannah Cullinane wrote in Auckland.
