Authorities have yet to produce evidence that the 31-year-old delivery driver, Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, shot dead by police, had any actual links to Islamic State.
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Cazeneuve said 59 people are still hospitalized after the attack Thursday, 29 of them in intensive care, out of 308 people injured overall.
Despite claims that he was radicalised as a strict Islamist soldier, the details on his phone paints a completely different picture of the life he led.
As France prepared to mark a minute’s silence to remember his victims, it emerged that Bouhlel’s psychological state had deteriorated in recent months.
Through the search history, investigators were able to determine that Bouhelel visited extremely violent websites and particularly searched for images of execution.
A man was arrested in Nice yesterday (Sunday) on suspicion of supplying arms to the Bastille Day killer, who sent a chilling text message demanding weapons minutes before the seafront massacre.
A report in the Nice Matin newspaper on Sunday said investigators had found no radicalization material in his flat, although they were still looking at his telephone and his computer.
The Islamic State has previously claimed responsibility for terrorist attacks even when there wasn’t any clear indication that the group played a role.
Neighbors described Bouhlel as volatile, prone to drinking and womanizing, and in the process of getting a divorce. His father said Bouhlel had problems from 2002 to 2004 “that caused a nervous breakdown”.
Last week’s attack took place in a pedestrian zone in Nice where 30,000 people – families and fun-seekers among them – turned out for Bastille Day celebrations.
The attack killed 84 people and wounded 202, many of them children, CBS News reported. “But at the same time, his operating method corresponds point-by-point to the instructions of the Islamic State group: to target a symbolic period (Bastille Day celebration), to cause the largest number of victims, to use any means available (a knife, a auto, a truck) to kill innocent people”.
Despite several brushes with the law for petty crime, Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had never appeared on the radar of intelligence services for links to radical Islam.
ISIL said it carried out the attack in response to calls to target civilians in countries that are part of a coalition fighting ISIL.
He has also enacted Operation Sentinel, introduced after terror attacks in January 2015 that allow 10,000 extra military personnel to boost the ranks of security forces across the country.
“We can not exclude that an unbalanced and very violent individual” has been “through a rapid radicalisation, committed to this absolutely despicable crime”, he said.
“We have no news, neither good nor bad”, said Johanna, a Lithuanian who was looking for her two friends, aged 20.
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Cazeneuve’s appeal comes in the wake of the latest deadly terror attack to hit the French republic, after a Tunisian drove a truck through a crowd in the resort town of Nice, killing 84 people and prompting hard questions in France over security failures.
