Along with dating apps and an apparent romantic connection with an elderly man, images on the mobile phone found in the truck’s cab show Bouhlel grinning with an unidentified friend in front of the large white truck taken days before his deadly attack on the Promenade des Angelais. Rather than dismantling the tributes to the dead, volunteers moved them from the spots where victims fell along the killer’s trajectory to a gazebo in a seaside park.
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Around 500 people in Nice have sought psychological support in the aftermath of the attack, she said.
Meanwhile, Nicolas Leslie, a University of California, Berkeley, student who had been missing after the attack, has been confirmed dead, the school said Sunday, relaying information it had received from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“What you see is that people pull together and communities become more bonded against the attacks”, he said, predicting that the same phenomenon could happen in France.
The more emotional in the crowd refused to let crews remove the trash until police wearing bullet-proof vests arrived and cooled tensions.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said Tuesday that all the victims of the Nice massacre had finally been identified.
Meanwhile, Italy is investigating whether Bouhlel recently had contacts with Tunisians living in the southeastern Puglia region, according to news agency ANSA.
On one hand, there is now good reason for government officials to make immediate assumptions after some mass killings that the Islamic State has played a role, however indirect.
The speaker said that, as French Muslims are having difficulty traveling to Turkey for insertion into Syria, the country of its self-proclaimed capital, Raqqa, it is better to stay and kill innocents at home.
As investigators continue to look into the attacker’s motives, his uncle in Tunisia, Sadok Bouhlel, told The Associated Press his nephew had been indoctrinated about two weeks ago by an Algerian member of the Islamic State group in Nice.
Prosecutor Francois Molins, who oversees terrorism investigations, said Monday that slain attacker Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel had clearly plotted out the Bastille Day attack, with reconnaissance visits to the beachfront where he plowed down revelers on Thursday.
Witnesses to the attack described it as “like he [Bouhlel] was playing Pac-Man”.
Two more suspects in the Bastille Day truck attack that killed 84 people have been transferred to French intelligence headquarters in Paris to face likely terrorism charges. The official provided no details on their identities, and said five people detained previously remain in custody.
Following the silence, for which thousands of people flocked to the Promenade des Anglais, there was applause and a rendition of the French national anthem as many of those singing defiantly raised their fists in the air.
In a sign of the mounting frustration over a string of attacks that have killed over 230 people since January 2015, Valls and two of his ministers were heckled by mourners who booed and shouted “Murderers” and “Resign!”
In the wake of the attack in Nice, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has criticised the government for not doing enough to provide security.
Eighty-four people were killed when Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel drove through crowds watching fireworks on Nice’s famed Promenade del Anglais. “They were scared”, she said.
On July 14, France’s national day, Bouhlel sent text messages to people who may have been accomplices, the official said.
“A complete stranger stayed with her in the immediate stages after she was injured and went in the ambulance”.
Europe 1 radio said CCTV footage from the days beforehand showed him driving through the area in the lorry, closely observing the scene.
There are tears, hugs and silence at the mountain of candles, flowers and cuddly toys on the beach promenade, where joggers stop and parents bring young children to read the messages.
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Critics asked how it was possible for a truck at high speed to career 2 km through the crowd before being stopped by police units, when a package of reinforced security measures were in place to secure events during holidays and a high-level terror alert had already been issued. Numerous dead and 308 injured were children.
