French police on Sunday arrested a man and a woman with ties to the man behind a truck ramming attack claimed by ISIL, a judicial source said.
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It has also been revealed that police were aware of Lahouaiej-Bouhlel for petty crimes.
Health Minister Marisol Touraine said that 85 people were still hospitalised, 18 people of them in critical condition. “They will not win, the evil ones…The people are back, they are in the restaurants and on the beach”. She is the mother of Bouhlel’s three children and was in the process of divorcing him.
Molins says bulk of killing is along a 1.9 km stretch from number 11 to 147 of the Promenade des Anglais, where the four lanes of roadway were closed to traffic in each direction and full of pedestrians.
Voters also denounced the lack of restraint among competing politicians while many of those killed in Thursday’s attack on the seafront Promenade des Anglais boulevard have still to be identified or buried. The psychiatrist, Chemceddine Hamouda, said Bouhlel’s parents brought him to his clinic in Msaken in August 2004.
“The person who carried out the operation in Nice to run down people was one of the soldiers of Islamic State”, the Amaq news agency affiliated with the militant Islamist group said. IS said he was following their call to target citizens of countries fighting the extremists. “That last day he said he was in Nice with his European friends to celebrate the national holiday”, Bouhlel’s brother Jabeur told Reuters in their native Tunisia.
Mohamed’s sister has said he was treated for psychological issues for years before leaving Tunisia.
He said photos and videos linked to radical Islam and Islamic State had been found on his telephone and computer.
Neighbours also described the attacker as volatile, prone to drinking and womanizing.
Authorities investigate the truck that ploughed through Bastille Day revellers in the French resort city of Nice, France.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls tells Le Journal du Dimanche that Bouhlel “was radicalised very quickly”. Some areas are still stained by blood.
After the driver fired at police, the officers fired some 20 rounds into the front of the lorry, killing the man at the wheel. An argument ensued, with other passers-by saying that his family deserved respect. They did not release information about a motive.
The attack plunged France into new grief and fear just eight months after gunmen killed 130 people in Paris.
Valls defended the government’s actions but warned that more lives will be lost to this kind of violence.
While Europol said there was no concrete evidence of foreign fighters systematically sneaking into Europe among the huge flow of refugees in 2015 there is a “real and imminent danger” that members of the Sunni Muslim refugee community will “become vulnerable to radicalization once in Europe, and … be specifically targeted by Islamist extremist recruiters”.
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France held a countrywide moment of silence Monday to remember the victims, but the national mourning was punctured by anger and political division.
